On Families of Systems Architecture

Architected families of systems (or equivalently product lines) are key industrial assets: they enable companies implementing this approach both to differentiate their products and address fragmented markets but also to pool common elements and thus reduce cost and time to market of their products. This paper presents a structured methodology for architecting families of systems, valid for systems in general (i.e., hybrid multi-physical systems mixing software and hardware dimensions), and enabling, via relevant variability indicators, to evaluate and optimize the variability of a family of systems. This paper also presents a variant of this methodology for high-volume families of systems, based on statistical analyses. For these two methodological variants, we present successful actual deployment results on aeronautical, defense, and high-tech case studies.