Inefficient product derivation practices can greatly diminish the productivity gains expected from a software product line approach. As a foundation for systematic and efficient product derivation a better understanding of the underlying activities in industrial product line development is required. This research has been developing a process framework that comprises important tasks product line stakeholders have to perform during product derivation. The framework is based on both literature and industrial practice. In this report, the status of the current research is presented along with the observations obtained thus far and how these observations were obtained.

Copyright © 2007 SAE International Product line approaches are well-known in many manu-facturing industries, such as consumer electronics, medical systems and automotive [1]. In recent years, ap-proaches with a similar background have rapidly emerged within Software Engineering, so called Soft-ware Product Line (SPL) approaches [2], [3]. As automotive manufacturers and suppliers design and implement complex applications, such as driver assis-tance [4], they strive for mechanisms that allow them to implement such functionality on integrated platforms. This offers the opportunity to build a variety of similar systems with a minimum of technical diversity and thus allows for strategic reuse of components. This has re-sulted in a growing interest in SPL approaches both in the software engineering and the automotive systems domain. This paper discusses the increasing importance that SPL approaches could play within the context of Auto-motive Systems Engineering. To accomplish this, we first provide an overview of the major challenges faced

Abstract—This paper proposes a framework for product development including hardware and software components. It provides separation of hardware dependent software, modifications of current product development process, and integration of software modules with existing product configuration models and assembly product structures. In order to decide the dependent software, the framework considers product configuration modules and engineering changes of associated software and hardware components. In order to support efficient integration of the two different hardware and software development, a modified product development process is proposed. The process integrates the dependent software development into product development through the interchanges of specific product information. By using existing product data models in Product Data Management (PDM), the framework represents software as modules for product configurations and software parts for product structure. The framework is applied to development of a robot system in order to show its effectiveness.