Feature-Oriented Development in Industrial Automation Software Ecosystems: Development Scenarios and Tool Support

Due to increased market demands for highly customized and machine-specific solutions in manufacturing, industrial software systems are often developed as software product lines (SPL) and organized as software ecosystems (SECO) with internal and external developers composing individual solutions based on a common technological platform. In such settings, software development usually occurs in a multi-stage process: system variants initially derived from a platform are adapted and extended to meet specific requirements. This common approach, however, results in significant challenges for software development and maintenance. In this paper we review key challenges we have been observing when investigating our industrial partner's software ecosystems. We then present a feature-oriented development approach we have been developing to tackle those. Our approach is backed with static analysis methods to deal with system variants and versions created in software maintenance.