Model-Driven STEP Application Protocol Extensions Combined with Feature Modeling Considering Geometrical Information - Koch, Thorsten; Holtmann, Jörg; Lindemann, Timo; Pires, Luís Ferreira; Hammoudi, Slimane; Selic, Bran (Revised Selected Papers of the 5th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, 2018)
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) build mechatronic, variant-rich systems using components from several suppliers in industry sectors like automation. The OEMs have to integrate the different components to the overall system based on a virtual layout. For this purpose, the suppliers provide geometrical information via the standardized exchange format STEP. Beyond the geometrical information, the OEMs need additional logical and technical information for the integration task as well as the variant handling. For that reason, STEP provides an extension mechanism for extending and tailoring STEP to project-specific needs. However, extending STEP requires extending several capabilities of all involved tools, which prevents the project-specific utilization of the STEP extensions mechanism. In order to cope with this problem, we presented in previous work a model-driven approach enabling the flexible specification of STEP extensions and particularly the automatic derivation of the required capability extensions for two involved tools. Nevertheless, the OEMs still need to apply several engineering tools from different domains to consider logical as well as geometrical constraints between product variants. In this paper, we hence combine our previous approach with extended feature models that consider conventional logical and particularly geometrical information, thereby enabling a holistic product line engineering for mechatronic systems. By means of an automation production system example, we illustrate how OEMs can orchestrate their overall supply and development processes through the combination of both approaches.
Keywords: book chapter