Product-Structuring Concepts for Automotive Platforms: A Systematic Mapping Study

The products of the automotive industry are facing one of the biggest changes: becoming digital smart devices on wheels. Driven by the rising amount of vehicle functions, electronic control units, and software, today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that are increasingly complex and hard to manage over their life cycle. To handle these challenges, the automotive industry is adopting and integrating methods like software product-line engineering, electrics/electronics platforms, and product generation. While these concepts are widely recognized in their respective research areas and various domains, there is limited research regarding the practical effectiveness of implementing these concepts in a software-driven automotive context. In this paper, we investigate existing product-structuring concepts and methods that consider both hardware and software artifacts, and their applicability to the automotive as well as other cyber-physical industries. For this purpose, we conducted a systematic mapping study to capture a comprehensive overview of existing product-structuring concepts and methods, based on which we discuss how the state-of-the-art can or cannot help solve the challenges of the automotive industry. Specifically, we analyze the practical applicability of the existing solutions to help practitioners apply them and to guide future research.