Author Description

This book contains the proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Product Family Engineering, PFE-4, held in Bilbao, Spain, October 3–5, 2001. This workshop was the fourth in a series started in 1996, with the same s- ject, software product-family engineering. Proceedings of the second and third workshops have been published as LNCS 1429 and LNCS 1951. The workshops were organized within co-operation projects of European - dustry, the?rst two by ARES (Esprit IV 20.477) 1995–1999. This project had three industrial and three academic partners, and focused on software archit- turesforproductfamilies.SomeofthepartnerscontinuedinITEAproject99005, ESAPS(1999–2001).ITEAisthesoftwaredevelopmentprogram(?!2023)within the European Eureka initiative. ITEA projects last for two years and ESAPS ́ was succeeded by CAFE (ITEA ip00004), which started in 2001 and will t- minate in 2003. This workshop was initially prepared within ESAPS and the ́ preparation continued in CAFE. Due to the attacks in the USA of September 11, several people were not able to?y and therefore did not show up. However, we have included their submissions in these proceedings. The session chair presented these submissions, and their inputs were used during the discussions. It was planned that Henk Obbink be workshop chair, and Linda Northrop and Sergio Bandinelli be co-chairs. However, because of personal circumstances Henk Obbink was not able to leave home during the workshop. Moreover both co-chairs had already enough other duties. Therefore the chairing duties were taken over by the program chair, Frank van der Linden.