A Toolchain for Delta-Oriented Modeling of Software Product Lines

Abstract

Software is increasingly individualized to the needs of customers and may have to be adapted to changing contexts and environments after deployment. Therefore, individualized software adaptations may have to be performed. As a large number of variants for aected systems and domains may exist, the creation and deployment of the individualized software should be performed automatically based on the software's conguration and context. In this paper, we present a toolchain to develop and deploy individualized software adaptations based on Software Product Line (SPL) engineering. In particular, we contribute a description and technical realization of a toolchain ranging from variability modeling over variability realization to variant derivation for the automated deployment of individualized software adaptations. To capture the variability within realization artifacts, we employ delta modeling, a transformational SPL implementation approach. As we aim to fulll requirements of industrial practice, we employ model-driven engineering using statecharts as realization artifacts. Particular statechart variants are further processed by generating C/C++ code, linking to external code artifacts, compiling and deploying to the target device. To allow for exible and parallel execution the toolchain is provided within a cloud environment. This way, required variants can automatically be created and deployed to target devices. We show the feasibility of our toolchain by developing the industry-related case of emergency response systems.

Context-aware reconfiguration in evolving software product lines

“…For future work, we are interested in creating user profiles by learning from user behavior and understanding their policies [53]. Finally, we are interested in evaluating our approach with our industry partner using the toolchain presented in [24], analyzing the scalability of our approach considering a real-world scenario with simulated cars to reconfigure, and extending HyVarRec for more complex analysis along the lines of [54].…”

“…The resulting configurations match the scenario we described in this section, thus showing the suitability of our methodology to provide optimal configurations with respect to the user preferences. HyVarRec has recently been adopted as the reconfiguration engine in an integrated toolchain to develop, deploy and reconfigure SPLs in an industrial setting [24].…”

A formal model for Multi Software Product Lines

“…A preliminary step in this direction is in illustrated in [35] which presents an MPL model that adopts a generic notion of variant and replaces the notions of SPL signature and interface with a more flexible notion of subtyping. The model is first illustrated by encoding a fragment of an MPL (developed with the toolchain of the HyVar project [36,37]) comprising delta-oriented SPLs where variants are statecharts [38] expressed in the format supported by Yakindu Statechart Tools [39]. Then the model is used to encode Portage [40] (the package manager of the Gentoo [41] Linux distribution) and to extract statistical information from it.…”

Automatic refactoring of delta-oriented SPLs to remove-free form and replace-free form

“…The toolchain of the HyVar project [10,38] supports the development of deltaoriented SPLs where the variants are statecharts [26] expressed in the format supported by Yakindu Statechart Tools [1]. In particular, delta-oriented SPLs of statecharts have been formalized by means of the core textual languages FSL (that capture the key ingredients of Yakindu statecharts) and F∆SL (for delta-oriented SPLs of FSL statcharts) [38].…”