Product Line Engineering Comes to the Industrial Mainstream

Product line engineering (PLE) is a systems engineering discipline to engineer a portfolio of related products in an efficient manner, taking full and ongoing advantage of the products’ similarities while respecting and managing their differences. Managing a portfolio as a single entity with variation, as opposed to a multitude of separate products, brings enormous efficiencies in production and maintenance. This paper shows that PLE has now matured into a repeatable, industrial‐strength engineering discipline. We define and explore the concepts central to modern product line engineering, and illustrate how it is becoming applied in two of the most challenging systems engineering domains of all: aerospace and defense, and automotive.