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Given its relevance, there is an extensive body of research for modeling variability in diverse domains. Regretfully, the community still faces issues and challenges to port or share variability models among tools and methodological approaches. There are researchers, for instance, implementing the same algorithms and analyses again because they use a specific modeling language and cannot use some existing tool. This paper introduces the High-Level Variability Language (HLVL), an expressive and extensible textual language that can be used as a modeling and an intermediate language for variability. HLVL was designed following an ontological approach, i.e., by defining their elements considering the meaning of the concepts existing on different variability languages. Our proposal not only provides a unified language based on a comprehensive analysis of the existing ones but also sets foundations to build tools that support different notations and their combination. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Domain specific languages; Software product lines.

Existing formal languages for the specification of self-adaptive cyber-physical systems focus on re-configuring the system-to-be depending on its current context, to satisfy the user’s requirements, that is by dynamically composing the software’s structure and behavior. While these approaches specify context-sensitive requirements, they rarely consider their run-time dynamic and scalable nature. The State-Constraint Transition (SCT) modeling language, introduced in this paper, provides an answer to the problems linked to the specification of dynamic requirements by introducing the concept of configuration states, in which requirements are translated into constraints. The expressiveness of existing approaches is thus extended, combining the ease of use of well-established notations, notably those based on characteristics, and those based on Finite-state Machines (FSM), with the computational power and expressiveness of the constraint programming approach. The paper briefly presents the results of the preliminary evaluation, which assesses the expressiveness, scalability, and domain independence of the SCT language.

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