Supporting the Development of Interdisciplinary Product Lines in the Manufacturing Domain

Abstract The increasing demand for highly customizable manufacturing systems leads to an extreme number of possible machine variants. Feature models are often used to manage this system diversity. The development and maintenance of feature models are error-prone and time-consuming tasks, especially considering industrial-size models with thousands of features. In many cases, engineers might want to focus only on a few features relevant for their own domain. Additionally, each change may lead to anomalies in the feature model. In this paper, we present an approach to provide engineering support by giving user-friendly explanations for hidden dependencies and anomalies in feature models.