Beschreibung:
AbstractThe automotive industry is faced today with the challenge of developing increasingly complex systems, but it also needs to integrate new emerging technologies while leveraging on existing designs, on previously developed assets. The concept of reuse is well described in different domains, such as software product line engineering, production, product development or marketing (as a mass customization strategy). In the automotive industry, we see systems engineering as the domain that can bridge the gap between high‐level customer requirements diversity and basic component development. The challenge is to be able to ensure traceability from customer down to components while being able to match requirement variability to component diversity and to ensure an effective management of variability at each level of abstraction or decomposition. The current paper presents an on‐going research that aims at developing a comprehensive framework for managing system variability under three main themes: development process conception, variability description and integration with current methods concerning vehicle development. Our paper will focus on the last two of these themes, presenting the needs for treating this issue and presenting a metamodel for variability representation and integration of external diversity.