Product Line Optimisation Sample Clauses

Product Line Optimisation. One of the additional things we hope to include is the notion of product line optimisation. Variability in EAST-ADL was originally included to help cater for different product lines that may have different sets of features but share an overall commonality of architecture. It is hoped that the optimisation process can be extended to work with not just a single model of a product line, but all models of a product line simultaneously. The dashed area in Figure 34 represents this 'inner optimisation loop'. The goal is that the optimisation variability will be separate to the product line variability, enabling the former to be resolved by the VRM but not the latter. This would result in a model being sent to the analysis wrappers that has had all of the optimisation variability resolved, to settle on a particular architecture to evaluate, but retains the product line variability showing which products have which features. The 'inner loop' would then iterate exhaustively through the different variations in the product line, evaluating each of them separately, and then combining them in an analysis-specific manner to return an overall heuristic evaluation value for that particular optimisation candidate. This process would therefore allow for different product line characteristics to be included in the consideration and evaluation of different architectural design candidates. In most cases, the VRM would be responsible for iterating through the product line variability, but the analysis wrappers themselves would have to be able to combine the results for each variant in a meaningful fashion. For example, cost may be determined by the sum of each piece cost multiplied by the piece count for that piece, whereas for something like safety, the wrapper may use a maximum unavailability value as its result instead. This would have to be determined on a case-by-case basis, as each analysis would have different semantics and would require different calculations, but it may be possible to create a set of generic operators (e.g. 'sum', 'product', 'minimum', 'maximum') that can be applied to each objective. Product line optimisation is still being investigated and is intended to be undertaken only after the general optimisation process has been successfully achieved. However, the architecture and tools are being planned in such a way that they can support the future extension to product line optimisation with minimum impact.