Managing Highly Complex Product Families with Multi-Level Feature Trees

Feature trees are a well-established instrument for domain analysis and modeling. But for highly complex product families like a vehicle manufacturer's product range - comprising well-above a thousand technical features - they become very large, and thus cumbersome and inflexible, especially when managing changes to the tree's structure over a long time. Furthermore, a conflict of aims arises when using feature trees in large organizations: while a single global feature tree for the entire company is desirable, local amendments for individual units or projects are indispensable in practice. In this paper, we present a detailed description of this problem and show its great relevance to the automotive domain. We then provide a detailed definition of multi-level feature trees as a possible solution to the above problem. Finally, we describe scenarios how such multi-level feature trees can be put into practice and introduce a prototypical tool implementation of this concept.