A steady increase in consumer demands, and severe constraints rnfrom both a somewhat damaged environment and newly installed govment polirncies, require today’s product design and development to be faster and more efficient rnthan ever before, yet utilizing even fewer resources. New holistic approaches, such rnas total product life cycle modeling which embraces all aspects of a product’s life rncycle, are current attempts to solve these problems. Within the field of product rndesign and modeling, feature technology has proved to be one very promising solurntion component. Owing to the tremendous increase in information technology, to rntransfer from low level data processing towards knowledge modeling and informarntion processing is about to bring a change in almost every computerized application.rnFrom this viewpoint, current problems of both feature frameworks and feature sysrntems are analyzed in respect to static and dynamic consistency breakdowns. The rnanalysis ranges from early stages of designing (feature) concepts to final system rnimplementation and application. For the first time, an integrated view is given on rnapproaches, solutions and practical experience, with feature concepts and structures,rnproviding both a feature framework and its implementation with sufficient system rnarchitecture and computational power to master a fair number of known consistency rnbreakdowns, while providing for robust contexts for feature semantics and integrated rnmodels. Within today’s heavy use of information technology these are pre-requisites rnif the full potential of feature technology is to be successfully translated into practice.