Featured Weighted Automata
This work addresses the need for quantitative analysis in software product lines, but it is incremental as it combines existing models without introducing a fundamentally new paradigm.
The paper tackles the problem of extending featured transition systems to incorporate quantitative aspects by introducing featured weighted automata, and shows that algorithms for computing quantitative properties like minimum reachability and energy properties can be applied across all feature sets at once.
A featured transition system is a transition system in which the transitions are annotated with feature expressions: Boolean expressions on a finite number of given features. Depending on its feature expression, each individual transition can be enabled when some features are present, and disabled for other sets of features. The behavior of a featured transition system hence depends on a given set of features. There are algorithms for featured transition systems which can check their properties for all sets of features at once, for example for LTL or CTL properties. Here we introduce a model of featured weighted automata which combines featured transition systems and (semiring-) weighted automata. We show that methods and techniques from weighted automata extend to featured weighted automata and devise algorithms to compute quantitative properties of featured weighted automata for all sets of features at once. We show applications to minimum reachability and to energy properties.