Product Line Engineering Working Group

Promoting Pragmatic Product Line Engineering.

Visit our members-only inet page

Working Group Purpose & Mission

Mission:

To promote Product Line Engineering and related Systems Engineering best practices and to coordinate activities and results relating to Product Line Engineering at INCOSE.

people6

Analytic Enablers

TechOps Domain

448

Members

2012

Established


Chair

Marco Forlingieri

Co-Chair

Rowland Darbin

 


Marco2png
Chair
Marco Forlingieri
Rowland
Co-Chair
Rowland Darbin

Scope

Virtually all systems engineering is performed in the context of a product line. Hardly anyone builds just one edition, just one flavor, of anything. Product lines are found in every industry, including aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, consumer electronics, computer systems, energy, telecommunications, semiconductor fabrication, software applications, e-commerce, and industrial automation. Product lines occur under every business model, including retail, government contracting, OEM, business-to-business, value-added reselling, and custom development.

As businesses everywhere strive to achieve competitive advantage and greater profitability, the need to elevate systems engineering to system family engineering is universal.


Goals

Help our members, their organizations, and the community at large to

  • Understand and apply pragmatic product line engineering
  • Share experiences, best practices, and the traps to avoid

Introduction

In the world of business and marketing, a product line is defined as a family of related products that are offered by the same organization, are priced differently, and vary from each other in ways that are noticeable to the customer. Product lines offer the opportunity to achieve economies of scope offered by the products’ similarities. Economies of scope refers to the savings possible when the same production processes can produce multiple products more cheaply in combination than separately.  

The systems and software engineering fields have embraced these concepts, creating the discipline of Product Line Engineering. In this world, a product line refers to a family of similar systems that vary from each other in features and functions. Product Line Engineering is the approach used to engineer a portfolio of related products in an efficient manner, taking advantage of the products’ similarities while managing their differences. This includes all the activities involved in planning, producing, delivering, deploying, sustaining, and even retiring products.  

A basic tenet of product line engineering is that it is extremely beneficial to consider the product line as the thing being produced, rather than the individual products. By exploiting product commonality while managing variation, engineering organizations can achieve improvements in effort, time, and quality. This enables a unified, automated approach across the entire life cycle – including engineering and operations disciplines; software, electrical, and mechanical domains; and tool ecosystems.

As PLE grew and matured, a specialized and highly efficient form emerged called Feature-based Product Line Engineering. Feature-based PLE relies on a managed set of features to describe the distinguishing characteristics that set the products in the product line apart from each other. A specialized software tool called a configurator applies the features that describe a particular product to the product line’s engineering artifacts (requirements, designs, tests, documentation, models, and so forth) and produces the artifacts specific to that product. Maintaining the shared assets for the product line, as opposed to each individual product, results in massive savings, as evidenced by numerous real-world case studies of applying the approach in some of the world’s most challenging domains and industries.

Adopting this approach offers strategic business advantages such as informed and deliberate cost-benefit decisions, higher quality, better margins, higher sales, and accelerated innovation. The strategic engineering benefits can include higher productivity, higher quality, faster time to market, and greater scalability.

ISO 26580 is the worldwide industry standard providing clear, industry-validated implementation guidance and patterns for Feature-based Product Line Engineering. This standard, written in collaboration with INCOSE, enables organizations to confidently adopt Feature-based Product Line Engineering

IS2024: International Focus

We are eagerly looking forward to our next international PLE WG Meetup.  We will do everything we can to make this a great collaborative event, including those attending in person and those joining virtually. Bring your ideas and your troubles and let’s work together to increase PLE success and awareness.

  • PLE Meeting: 3rd July 2024 16:00 - 18:00
  • PLE WG Dinner: 3rd July 2024 18:30 - 20:30

Be sure to check the official technical program for meeting location and other PLE-related contributions.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Planned Activities

  • The WG is looking for inputs on the creation of a PLE competency/recognition framework
  • Creation of PLE-specific vision companion to the INCOSE Vision 2035
  • Collaboration for Paperless Presentations for IS 2023
  • Collecting ideas for follow-on standards to ISO 26580

Planned Work Products

Planned Work Products are TBD

Presentations, tutorials and activities recommended by the PLE WG at the IS2024

The PLE International Working Group invites you to the

INCOSE International Symposium

July 2 - 6, 2024

In Person and Virtual Events

PLEagenda

Download a copy of the INCOSE_IS2024_PLE_Agenda.

 

Yammer is INCOSE's social media platform for members. Use your INCOSE-issued Microsoft credential to login and join the conversation. INCOSE credentials are in the form of [email protected] or [email protected].   

Contact Us