An approach for managing a distributed feature model to evolve self-adaptive dynamic software product lines

Abstract

While maintaining core assets of a product line, product line engineers may need to adapt the assets to accommodate new requirements and new devices from the changing and newly emerging markets. Additionally, due to the emergence of new computing environments like autonomous systems (e.g., ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things), there is increasing demand for dynamic adaptations of core assets, and this often needs to be managed with minimum human intervention. We propose an approach for managing a distributed feature model in order to facilitate the adaptation of self-adaptive dynamic software product lines (DSPLs). In addition, our approach allows the change of behaviours to promote the long lifecycle of self-adaptive DSPL. The case study applied in this paper is a baby care system (BCS). BCS assists people to monitor a baby while they are sleeping. We tested our BCS in the following scenarios: adding features, removing features and changing behaviours. All these scenarios showed that it is possible to use our approach to self-adapt DSPLs.

A study on dynamic aspects variability in the SOLAR educational software ecosystem

“…The modeling of dynamic variability has proved to be a great challenge due to aspects such as the number of variants and their relationships, traceability of the model variants being aligned to the variants represented in the architecture, reconfiguration representation of the variants according to the context of the environment, representation restrictions between variants, and context restrictions. Thus, some studies have extended the feature model to meet these challenges of representing dynamic variability [30][31][32]. However, few tools are supported for representing these extensions, such as the Variamos [24] and the DyMMer [25] tools.…”

Feature Model Configuration Reuse Scheme for Self-Adaptive Systems

“…However, the software configuration is yet to be modeled as a feature in the FMs. Other studies [22][23][24][25] have incorporated FMs into systems adaptation process, but no notions or extensions have been introduced into FMs to enable them to model these adaptation processes or their reused processes. A few works have enriched FMs using concepts and extensions to enable them to model SASs.…”