Model-driven development is one approach to combating the complexity of designing software intensive systems. A model-driven approach allows designers to use domain notations to specify solutions and domain constraints to ensure that the proposed solutions meet the required objectives. Many domains, however, require models that are either so large or intricately constrained that it is extremely difficult to manually specify a correct solution. This chapter presents an approach to provide that leverages a constraint solver to provide modeling guidance to a domain expert. The chapter presents both a practical framework for transforming models into constraint satisfaction problems and shows how the Command Pattern can be used to integrate a constraint solver into a modeling tool.
Product-line architectures (PLAs) designed for mobile devices create a unique challenge for automated product variant selection engines since variants must be derived on-the-fly as devices are discovered. Current automation techniques do not incorporate device resource consumption constraints into variant selection and do not address how a PLA can be designed to improve automated variant selection speed. This paper presents a tool called Scatter whose input is (1) the requirements of PLA construction and (2) the resources available on a discovered mobile device and whose output is the optimal variant that can be deployed to the device. Scatter provides automatic variant selection based on configuration and resource constraints and also ensures that variant selection is optimal with regard to a configurable cost function. The paper presents our results from experiments with Scatter and how PLA design decisions affect a constraint-based variant selection engine's solving speed.11th International Software Product Line Conference 0-7695-2888-0/07 $25.00
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