Enterprise Feature Ontology For Feature-Based Product Line Engineering And Operations

Feature trees have been the standard data structure for representing product diversity in feature-based systems and software product line engineering (PLE). For basic product lines of modest size or complexity, one or several modular feature trees can be sufficient for managing the and resolving the variation present across the engineering assets in the systems engineering 'V' - from requirements, to design, through implementation, verification, validation, documentation, and more - in the software, mechanical, and electrical disciplines. However, enterprises seeking to adopt PLE at all levels of their organization, including areas such as product marketing, portfolio planning, manufacturing, supply chain, product sales, product service and maintenance, Internet-of-Things, resource planning, and much more are finding that thousands of non-engineering users need different views and interaction scenarios with a feature diversity representation. This paper describes a feature ontology (a specification of the meaning of terms in the feature modeling realm) that is suitable for managing the feature-based product line engineering and operations in the largest and most complex product line organizations. This ontology is based on layers of abstraction that each incrementally constrain the complexity and combinatorics and targets specific roles in the organization for greater degrees of efficiency, precision, and automation across an entire business enterprise.