XML-Based Feature Modelling

Abstract

This paper describes a feature modelling technique aimed at modelling the software assets behind a product family. The proposed technique improves upon traditional feature modelling approaches in five respects. First, it proposes a feature meta-model that removes ambiguities found in earlier metamodels. Second, it offers a natural way to express complex composition rules for the features. Third, it offers a means to decompose large feature diagrams into extensible and self-contained modules. Fourth, it defines an XML-based approach to expressing the feature models that offers a low-cost path to the development of support tools for building the models. Fifth, it explicitly supports both the modelling of the product family and of the applications instantiated from it. The paper presents the feature modelling technique in the context of an ongoing project to build a generative environment for family instantiation. Experience from two cases studies is discussed at the end of the paper.

Ontology-Based Feature Modeling and Application-Oriented Tailoring

“…The structure is similar to the XML-based three-layer structure in [2], while the main difference is that in our method domain model and application model share the same meta-model, only with different variability policy. Domain model contains domain-level variability, which will be specialized during application engineering to derive final products [4].…”

“…Validation of these rules is not as direct as the basic rules (see 3.1). So some methods are proposed to capture and validate on the constraints, such as propositional logic [10,13], first-order logic [3] and XSL [2]. In our method, constraints are captured by inference rules and validated by ontology reasoning.…”

“…For example, the feature macro mechanism is proposed in [2] to split a large model into independent modules. A feature macro contains a feature node with all its sub-nodes, and can be extended in different instances by adding new features to its sub-tree.…”

“…First, it should provide sufficient business knowledge for the design of architecture and components. Second, it must offer the means to specify both features and their composition rules [2]. Then validation of the model can be performed on constraints.…”

The Adaptability Challenge for Embedded Control System Software

“…In general, feature m odels ( Beuche, et al, 2003;Cechticky, et al, 2004;Czarnecki and Eisenecker, 2000) are a means to model the variability and multiplicity of configurations of a certain system. In our context, they can be used to describe the features of the potential applications that can be instantiated from a repository of reusable software assets.…”