Automated reasoning for multi-step feature model configuration problems

  • Authors:
  • Jules White;Brian Dougherty;Doulas C. Schmidt;David Benavides

  • Affiliations:
  • Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN;University of Seville, Seville, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 13th International Software Product Line Conference
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

The increasing complexity and cost of software-intensive systems has led developers to seek ways of increasing software reusability. One software reuse approach is to develop a Software Product-line (SPL), which is a reconfigurable software architecture that can be reused across projects. Creating configurations of the SPL that meets arbitrary requirements is hard. Existing research has focused on techniques that produce a configuration of the SPL in a single step. This paper provides three contributions to the study of multi-step configuration for SPLs. First, we present a formal model of multi-step SPL configuration and map this model to constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs). Second, we show how solutions to these CSP configuration problem CSPs can be derived automatically with a constraint solver. Third, we present empirical results demonstrating that our CSP-based technique can solve multi-step configuration problems involving hundreds of features in seconds.