Embedded Software

aachen.de Companies successfully applying product line approaches of-ten follow a long-term strategy and need to plan product portfolios years ahead. For instance in the automotive indus-try, managers constantly make decisions about future prod-uct evolution, like “the LED tail lights will be introduced with the next facelift and the LED front lights two years later”. With a raising number of features, feature changes, and evolution steps, a systematic approach for evolution planning becomes essential. However, there is only very lit-tle support for such evolution in model-based product line engineering so far. This paper presents an approach for extending model-driven product line engineering towards automated and tool-supported techniques for product line evolution. We provide a feature-based approach to model the variability over time and a catalogue of change operators for feature models