Combining declarative and procedural views in the specification and analysis of product families

Abstract

We introduce the feature-oriented language FLan as a proof of concept for specifying both declarative aspects of product families, namely constraints on their features, and procedural aspects, namely design processes and run-time behaviour. FLan is inspired by the concurrent constraint programming paradigm. A store of constraints allows one to specify in a declarative way all common constraints on features, including cross-tree constraints as known from feature models. A standard yet rich set of process-algebraic operators allows one to specify in a procedural way the configuration and behaviour of products. There is a close interaction between both views: (i) the execution of a process is constrained by its store to forbid undesired configurations; (ii) a process can query a store to resolve design and behavioural choices; (iii) a process can update the store, for instance to add new features. An implementation in the Maude framework allows for a variety of formal automated analyses of product families specified in FLan, ranging from consistency checking to model checking.

Towards Modular Verification of Software Product Lines with mCRL2

“…the 'Logic of Everything', is renowned to be highly expressive and to subsume temporal logics like LTL and (A)CTL [17,10,14]. The model-checking approaches of [12,6] are based on LTL, that of [26] on the multivalued modal µ-calculus, and those of [25,2] on (A)CTL. Only the approach of [6] is implemented, viz.…”

“…The model-checking approaches of [12,6] are based on LTL, that of [26] on the multivalued modal µ-calculus, and those of [25,2] on (A)CTL. Only the approach of [6] is implemented, viz. in the Maude toolset (maude.cs.uiuc.edu).…”

“…In line with [12,6], transitions are assumed to be tagged with a feature (not made explicit here for readability). An action can only occur in a product if the corresponding feature is selected for the product, i.e.…”

“…Given the rise of software product line engineering in embedded, distributed and safety-critical systems, it is important to provide a means of quality assurance. The work closest to ours are the process-algebraic approaches of [26,6] and, originating from [18], the transition system-based approaches of [25,2,12]. However, a product line's variability is exponential in the number of features.…”

Model Checking Value-Passing Modal Specifications

“…We consider a process algebra in which the parallel composition operator is parametrized by a set of actions to be synchronized, which contrasts the recent approaches in [7,24,31]. A system can then be defined inductively by composition, with the additional distinction between may and must actions.…”