Staged configuration of dynamic software product lines with complex binding time constraints

Abstract

Dynamic software product lines (DSPL) constitute a promising approach for developing highly-configurable, runtime-adaptive systems in a feature-oriented way. A DSPL integrates both variability in time and space in a unified conceptual framework. For this, domain features are equipped with additional binding time information to distinguish between static configuration parameters and dynamically (re-) configurable features. Until now, little support exists to specify and validate staged (re-)configuration semantics for DSPLs in a concise way. In this paper, we propose conservative extensions to domain feature models comprising variable feature binding times together with different kinds of binding time constraints. Those extensions are motivated by a real-world industrial case study from the automation engineering domain. Our implementation performs a model transformation into plain feature models treatable by corresponding state-of-the-art analysis tools. We conducted an evaluation of our approach concerning the case study.