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Automotive Systems Engineering

Automotive engineers must deliver increasingly more complex systems faster and at lower cost, while improving on already high levels of safety, reliability and performance.

Demand for product differentiation comes from several sources and complicates systems engineering even further:

  • Customer and product-specific requirements
  • Market differentiation e.g. high vs. low-end products
  • Alternative technology solutions and strategies
  • Legal and Environmental constraints e.g. emissions regulations

Traditional approaches to address differentiation such as modifying copied files (clone-and-own), configuration-management branching, language-level constructs such as if-defs, special file-names, and build and / or installer scripts don't scale well.

Software Product Lines offer a scalable solution to product differentiation.

In Software Product Lines, individual system variants are built from a set of reusable, configurable components using a flexible assembly process.

Software Product Lines scale well because most of the functionality of each new systems variant has already been implemented in the reusable software components.


Read about pure::variants, a tool for developing Software Product Lines.

Find out about starting Software Product Lines.

Read how our assessment service can help you decide whether or not to start a Software Product Line.

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Handling functional variants in Simulink® models

Download our free white paper describing a case study of use of pure::variants in conjunction with The Mathworks Simulink® toolset.

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