Towards Component-based Domain Engineering Asmaa Alayed, Kung-Kiu Lau, Petr Stepan and Cuong Tran School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom Email: aalayed,kung-kiu,pstepan,ctran@cs.manchester.ac.uk Abstract: Domain engineering is the first phase of product line engineering. The key artefact created by domain engineer- ing 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.