Product Line Engineering Comes to the Industrial Mainstream

Product line engineering (PLE) is a systems engineering discipline to engineer a portfolio of related products in an efficient manner, taking full and ongoing advantage of the products’ similarities while respecting and managing their differences. Managing a portfolio as a single entity with variation, as opposed to a multitude of separate products, brings enormous efficiencies in production and maintenance. This paper shows that PLE has now matured into a repeatable, industrial-strength engineering discipline. We define and explore the concepts central to modern product line engineering, and illustrate how it is becoming applied in two of the most challenging systems engineering domains of all: aerospace and defense, and automotive. What Is Product Line Engineering? Product line engineering (PLE) is a way to engineer a portfolio of related products in an efficient manner, taking full advantage of the products’ similarities while respecting and managing their differences. By “engineer,” we mean all of the activities involved in planning, producing, delivering, deploying, sustaining, and retiring products. Born in the 1980s in the software field, but now having grown well beyond those early roots, PLE offers large savings observed from engineering the whole family rather than separately engineering each member. Numerous case studies show that exploiting the commonality throughout the products’ total life cycles can return substantial improvements in time to market, cost, portfolio scalability, engineer productivity, and product quality [24]; no other engineering paradigm shift has, to our knowledge, brought about results that rival these.