Towards a software product line for automated transportation systems
Danny Weyns, Alexander Helleboogh, Tom Holvoet, Kurt Schelfthout, Wim Van Betsbrugge · Lirias · 2008
Since the seventies, Egemin has successfully been providing full life cycle support for automated transportation systems (ATS) used to automate internal logistics in production and warehousing environments. With increasing customer demands a number of considerable problems related to the company’s engineering practice came to the surface. Examples are duplication of solutions and erosion of the software and its architecture. With the introduction of a software product line (SPL) Egemin aims to shift the focus of its activities from developing individual products (ATS for clients) towards the development of a repository of core assets for a family of ATS supported by an explicitly defined production process. The objective is to establish planned reuse aiming to improve the quality of the software and ultimately to increase productivity. A particular challenge with the introduction of the SPL is support for runtime variability that allows an ATS to dynamically adapt its behavior to changes in the operating environment. In this paper, we outline how Egemin is introducing a dynamic SPL for ATS. We give particular attention to support for runtime variability. 1