Context-Oriented Strategy for Modularization of Engineering Design Processes: An Automotive Case Study

Project planning is a necessary but repetitive and time-consuming activity. Organizational reference process models are often only used as marginal input for project planning, which is mostly conducted manually by experts. Process Tailoring has been introduced in software engineering as a means to methodically instantiate project plans from reference models. However, corresponding approaches focus largely on the software-implementation of model transformations, less on the structured acquisition and derivation of tailoring-relevant knowledge. In this paper, we present a methodology for mapping a processes application context and deriving a process module architecture that satisfies variability-related requirements. The design approach is applied in an industrial case study at an original equipment manufacturer in the automotive industry.