Product line tool-chain: Variability in critical systems

Competitiveness has thrown industries towards adding more features to existent products increasing their inherent complexity. One of the main challenges is to define mechanisms and tools to control the propagation of the dependencies through the different engineering phases, keeping consistency among requirements and the final system design. SPL provide mechanisms to control the evolution and design of product families, based on an exhaustive variant analysis. However, the critical system industry does not adopt them due to the lack of tool support for the complete life-cycle. In this paper, a product line tool chain is presented based on the analysis of current SPL tools and approaches in order to fit the specific needs within industry partners in the CESAR project. The main goal is to show the benefits of a combination of SPL tools in an industrial scenario.