Development of a Modeling Language to Connect Features, Functions and Components☆

Abstract In order to select the components for a technical system, a detailed description of the systems features is necessary. For this purpose feature-trees are currently preferred. By selecting features from these feature-trees the corresponding components are chosen. Within the development process it is also useful to describe the functions of the technical system as well and to associate these functions with the components. For this functional-networks are used so far, which describe the dependencies between the different functions. But feature-trees and functional-networks are considered separately and not associated with the components within one model. For this reason, the features and functions of a system are usually chosen in advance. So there are two independent ways to choose components for one product. By evolution and reusing of existing components it is possible to create systems with new features or functions. If it would be possible to describe feature, functions and components within one language, proposals for new components could be made. In this paper an approach for describing features, functions and components with one language is introduced.