Comparative Expressiveness of Product Line Calculus of Communicating Systems and 1-Selecting Modal Transition Systems

Abstract

Product line calculus of communicating systems (PL-CCSs) is a process calculus proposed to model the behavior of software product lines. Modal transition systems (MTSs) are also used to model variability in behavioral models. MTSs are known to be strictly less expressive than PL-CCS. In this paper, we show that the extension of MTSs with hyper transitions by Fecher and Schmidt, called 1-selecting modal transition systems (1MTSs), closes this expressiveness gap. To this end, we propose a novel notion of refinement for 1MTSs that makes them more suitable for specifying variability for software product lines and prove its various essential properties.

Modal transition system encoding of featured transition systems

“…Examples of such formal models include featured transition systems (FTSs) [1], modal transition systems (MTSs) [2] and various extensions thereof [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. The expressive power of some of the aforementioned formalisms has been assessed in [12,13,14,15]. The comparison of the expressiveness is established based on proving the (non-)existence of an encoding, which is a transformation from one class of models to the other by preserving the set of derivable model variants in terms of implementing Labeled Transition Systems (LTSs).…”