Introducing Software Product Lines in Model-Based Design Processes: An Industrial Experience

Software has gained a critical role in the automotive domain that is becoming more and more complex. The ever-growing complexity in automotive software development is due to its high variability. In this scenario, automotive companies need to adopt cost-effective development processes in order to manage the variability of the produced software. A well-known solution for dealing with this problem is the adoption of Software Product Lines (SPL). In this paper we report an experience we performed in collaboration with the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) company for the application of the SPL in one of its Model-Based Design (MBD) processes. SPL were supported by AutoMative, a software infrastructure we implemented for the semi-automatic generation of Product Architectures from specification documents.