A branching model for variability-affected cyber-physical systems

The use of cyber-physical systems (CPS) for different tasks and in multiple environments where different laws and standards need to be adhered to often leads to development of multiple product variants. In the domain of embedded systems, product line engineering (PLE) is an established approach to manage variability that can be used to efficiently develop and maintain those variants. At the same time CPS are known for their iterative evolution process. While software configuration management (SCM) offers solutions to manage software evolution, it has to be adapted for the use in combination with PLE. One important part of SCM that needs to be adapted to PLE is version control. This paper presents a branching model that covers use cases that version control has to support in a PLE context.