PLE in Action | Event Recap

This presentation showcases how Lockheed Martin has operated in the past, and how it is now redefining Product Line Engineering (PLE) through the adoption of Pure Variants. Attendees will hear about the enterprise PLE strategy, hurdles, and successes. This session will highlight how Pure Variants streamlines design reuse, accelerates development cycles, and enhances traceability across multiple platforms. The presentation will touch on the measurable benefits of PLE (reduced cycle time, improved reuse, lower integration risk) that empower our teams to deliver diverse, high‑performance systems faster and with greater confidence.

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The aircraft cabin interiors industry faces a dual challenge: the continuous growth of the aviation market and increasingly personalized customer expectations. To meet rising production rates while delivering highly differentiated products, Safran Seats has initiated a significant transformation of its development model.

The Model‑Based Product Line Engineering (MBPLE) approach represents a key enabler in this evolution. It provides a structured way to define product lines that efficiently cover a wide range of market segments — from catalog seats to fully co‑designed and highly customized solutions. This approach has the potential to become a genuine game changer for performance and innovation.

However, the development of product lines extends beyond the system engineering domain. It must seamlessly integrate both software and hardware aspects, bridging Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Achieving this requires establishing a single source of variability across the entire product lifecycle.

In this context, we propose a scalable framework for extending PLE from ALM to PLM, laying the groundwork for advancing this new frontier in product line engineering.

To reinforce the cost‑driven foundations of the PLE approach, we also demonstrate how cost data and technology roadmaps can be incorporated into the ALM environment, supporting decision‑making and enhancing program management effectiveness.

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This presentation discusses Lockheed Martin's lessons learned as we implemented Product Line Engineering with Pure Variants to manage variation in DOORS requirements specifications and Cameo system architectures. Attendees will hear about the benefits of using Pure Variants for Product Line Engineering as well as methods of implementation and the key takeaways that made some methods more successful than others.

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Airbus is transforming how it handles complex specifications by employing Model-Based Product Line Engineering (MBPLE). This robust methodology is deployed across all three co-development axes—Product, Industrial, and Services—demonstrating its versatility for diverse systems within Commercial Aircraft, Helicopters, and Defense & Space.

This presentation will illustrate how MBPLE addresses the challenges presented by legacy specifications, using a Passenger Seats Use Case as an example. The MBPLE approach introduces a 150% Model-Based Specification (MBS) for the Seat, which is intrinsically linked to a feature model. The specification leverages the Airbus MOFLT MBSE framework and achieves modularity through the implementation of Variation Points. This strategic transition yields substantial advantages, including enhanced specification quality, automated generation of applicable requirements, and a high degree of model reusability through 150%, 120%, and 100% configurations.

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Product lines deliver three key benefits: cost avoidance, reduced risk, and shortened development schedules. The two main drivers of this are commonality through reuse and efficient variation management. The standard approach to commonality is to develop common core components across member products of a product line. When a common component is adopted by multiple product lines, its return on investment rises even further. In some cases, such a component becomes the foundation of a lower‑level product line, often referred to as a building block line. Product Line Engineering (PLE) tools mainly focus on solving the variation management side of the equation; however, commonality is not automatically achieved. This brief outlines how our PLE tool suites can evolve to better enable reuse, achieving a more balanced approach that empowers enterprises to scale product lines effectively.

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As industries accelerate toward fully digital enterprises, organizations face increasing complexity in managing tools, processes, integrations, and compliance requirements across their digital ecosystems. For years, STC has delivered digital engineering (DE) consulting services to address these challenges. While early engagements successfully applied model-based systems engineering (MBSE) best practices, they were often highly customized, one-off efforts that required recreating similar artifacts across customers—resulting in inefficiencies, duplicated effort, and limited scalability.

The Factory Framework
Our framework consists of reusable, configurable model assets that capture best practices, tool data, integration mechanisms, maturity criteria, and standards traceability. Rather than starting from ground zero, we generate customer-specific ecosystem models derived from a curated knowledge base containing:

• Over 550 digital tools with documented interfaces, export formats, integration patterns, and digital thread coverage
• Proven integration mechanisms (including COTS and custom approaches)
• Industry best practices and digital engineering capabilities
• Traceability to standards-derived DE requirements and STC-defined measurable criteria

The framework is organized into five integrated model domains:

1. Enterprise Factory
   Captures enterprise goals, drivers, phasing strategies, organizational impacts, training considerations, and role-based activity allocation—ensuring digital transformation aligns with mission objectives.
2. Solution Factory
   Contains the core digital ecosystem knowledge base, including tools, integration options, digital thread mechanisms, and reusable architectural patterns.
3. Deployment Factory
   Provides implementation-level fidelity for key authoritative sources such as digital thread platforms, SysML tools, and PLM systems. It includes infrastructure dependencies, versioning, ports, and security considerations—supporting deployment planning, maintenance strategies, and cybersecurity assessments.
4. DE Standards & Requirements Model
   Defines traceable digital engineering requirements used across the framework to evaluate compliance, coverage, and improvement opportunities.
5. Digital Assessment Framework Model
   STC’s measurable maturity model, designed to avoid the ambiguity common in traditional maturity matrices. While we maintain traceability to widely recognized frameworks, our approach emphasizes quantifiable metrics to drive actionable outcomes.

Configurable Ecosystems, Not Static Reports
Using MBPLE, we generate tailored ecosystem models that reflect a customer’s actual toolset, integration posture, and enterprise priorities. These configurable models can represent:

• Current-state architectures
• Future-state solution options
• Phased implementation stages
• Alternative tool or integration scenarios

The delivered model becomes the primary mechanism for collaboration, analysis, and communication throughout the engagement. Customers retain a reusable source of truth that supports long-term evolution—even after the engagement concludes. Many clients independently maintain and mature these models, enabling seamless re-engagement when deeper implementation support is needed.

Deliverables that Drive Action
The Factory of the Future approach produces actionable, model-derived outputs, including:

• Executive-level findings and ecosystem visualizations
• A prioritized, weighted task roadmap based on benefit, timeline, and dependencies
• Recommended courses of action and phased implementation strategies
• A structured data repository from interviews and analysis

The Outcome
STC’s Digital Engineering Factory of the Future transforms digital transformation from a fragmented, tool-centric exercise into a structured, repeatable, and scalable capability. By leveraging reusable model assets, measurable maturity criteria, and product-line-driven configuration, organizations gain:

• Accelerated ecosystem assessments
• Reduced duplication and rework
• Improved integration clarity
• Quantifiable maturity progression
• A sustainable, model-based foundation for continuous digital evolution

This is not just an assessment methodology—it is a deployable, extensible digital engineering operating model designed to help enterprises move from isolated digital initiatives to a truly integrated Factory of the Future.

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The session highlighted how Pure Variants supports Integrated Product Engineering (IPE) by connecting PLE with PLM and ALM, including integration with Codebeamer and Windchill for end-to-end traceability and holistic PLE. It emphasized openness and 3rd‑party integration, enabling flexible, vendor‑agnostic PLE adoption.

Updates on MBPLE showed how Pure Variants integrates with SysML v2 to manage variability directly in system models for MBSE 2.0. The session also underlined active engagement of PTC INCOSE and OMG standards communities and PLE’s global PTC presence, soon supported by local experts in North America.

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