Hierarchical Variability Modeling for Software Architectures
This work addresses variability management in software architectures for product line development, particularly in domains like automotive systems, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods and tools.
The paper tackles the problem of representing component variability in product line development by proposing hierarchical variability modeling, which integrates variability specification with component hierarchies and is formalized through a meta model and implemented in the MontiArc language.
Hierarchically decomposed component-based system development reduces design complexity by supporting distribution of work and component reuse. For product line development, the variability of the components to be deployed in different products has to be represented by appropriate means. In this paper, we propose hierarchical variability modeling which allows specifying component variability integrated with the component hierarchy and locally to the components. Components can contain variation points determining where components may vary. Associated variants define how this variability can be realized in different component configurations. We present a meta model for hierarchical variability modeling to formalize the conceptual ideas. In order to obtain an implementation of the proposed approach together with tool support, we extend the existing architectural description language MontiArc with hierarchical variability modeling. We illustrate the presented approach using an example from the automotive systems domain.