Towards Component-based Domain Engineering

Domain engineering is the first phase of product line engineering. The key artefact created by domain engineering for product engineering is a reference architecture for all possible systems or products in the domain. In existing domain engineering techniques, there are no well-defined methods for constructing reference architectures. Existing domain engineering tools mostly stop short of constructing reference architectures. In this paper, we show how a component-based approach to domain engineering can provide a remedy.