System families are strategic assets, which can be used for European advancement. Prime export products are based on system families. As the importance of technology increases most of those products have become information intensive. Unfortunately software-engineering technology has been developed mainly for creating one product at a time and existing process models do not well address system family development.

The companies participating in this consortium have investigated and developed technology for system families now for five years and experiences gained so far are very significant. In particular most were involved in the ITEA project 99005, ESAPS, working on a similar subject. The structuring of systems into product families allows sharing design effort within the product family and such counters the impact of ever growing complexity. This makes it possible to sustain, or even increase, the rate of product introduction.

The main drive of CAFÉ is to go from ESAPS concepts to application: In addition a couple of topics are treated that extend the work done in ESAPS. CAFÉ is a next project in a sequence of Projects: