Integrating hundred's of products through one architecture: the industrial IT architecture

During the last few years, software product line engineering has gained significant interest as a way for creating software products faster and cheaper. But what architecture is needed to integrate huge amounts of products, from different product lines? This paper describes such an architecture and its support processes and tools. Through cases, it is illustrated how the architecture is used to integrate new --- and old --- products in such diverse integration projects as vessel motion control, airport baggage handling systems, pulp&paper and oil&gas, in a very large organization. However, in a large organization it is a challenge to make everyone follow an architecture. Steps taken to ensure global architectural consistency are presented. It is concluded that a single architecture can be used to unify development in a huge organization, where the distributed development practices otherwise may prohibit integration of various products.