Reconciling Automation and Flexibility in Product Derivation

Abstract

Product derivation, i.e. reusing core assets to build products, did not receive sufficient attention from the productline community, yielding a frustrating situation. On the one hand, automated product derivation approaches are inflexible; they do not allow products meeting unforeseen, customer-specific, requirements. On the other hand, approaches that consider this issue do not provide adequate methodological guidelines nor automated support.This paper proposes an integrated product derivation approach reconciling the two views to offer both flexibility and automation. First, we perform a pre-configuration of the product by selecting desired features in a generic feature model and automatically composing their related product-line core assets. Then, we adapt the pre-configured product to its customer-specific requirements via derivation primitives combined by product engineers and controlled by constraints that flexibly set product line boundaries. Our process is supported by the Kermeta metamodeling environment and illustrated through an example.

Variability Modelling in the ABS Language

“…In [18], architectural variability is represented by change sets containing additions, removals or modifications of components and component connections that are applied to a base line architecture. Perrouin et al [29] obtain a product model by model composition and subsequently refinement by model transformation.…”

Weaving Variability into Domain Metamodels

“…In this section, we present a generic variability metamodel inspired from [2]. It relies upon formal studies of variability management in SPL [6,7] and in particular feature diagramming [8][9][10][11], which is a very popular notation in this community.…”

“…One interesting result of these formal studies is that it is possible to extract a pivot abstract syntax subsuming the expressiveness of these existing notations hence forming a universal basis independent of any peculiar notation. This abstract syntax is the source of our metamodel (see [2] for details).…”

“…Our generic variability metamodel (See Figure 1) is a customization of the feature metamodel [2] tailored to describe variability amongst Ecore concepts. In particular the notion of feature hierarchy, which is very specific to feature diagram, has been omitted because this hierarchy is imposed by the target metamodel (see Section 6).…”

“…The main idea behind SPL is to capture the commonalities of the different products as well as the specificities (variability) of each particular product. In this paper, we focus on Model-Driven SPL [2] where the product line itself and the derived products are models. The models are derived using Model-Driven Engineering techniques, such as model transformation, model composition or aspect model weaving.…”