Synthesis of Attributed Feature Models From Product Descriptions: Foundations

Feature modeling is a widely used formalism to characterize a set of products (also called configurations). As a manual elaboration is a long and arduous task, numerous techniques have been proposed to reverse engineer feature models from various kinds of artefacts. But none of them synthesize feature attributes (or constraints over attributes) despite the practical relevance of attributes for documenting the different values across a range of products. In this report, we develop an algorithm for synthesizing attributed feature models given a set of product descriptions. We present sound, complete, and parametrizable techniques for computing all possible hierarchies, feature groups, placements of feature attributes, domain values, and constraints. We perform a complexity analysis w.r.t. number of features, attributes, configurations, and domain size. We also evaluate the scalability of our synthesis procedure using randomized configuration matrices. This report is a first step that aims to describe the foundations for synthesizing attributed feature models

Configuring Cloud-Service Interfaces Using Flow Inheritance

Pavel Zaichenkov, Olga Tveretina, Alex Shafarenko, ‘Configuring Cloud-Service Interfaces Using Flow Inheritance’, paper presented at iFMCloud'16: The First International Workshop on Formal Methods for and on the Cloud, Reykjavic, Iceland, 1- 4 June, 2016.Technologies for composition of loosely-coupled web services in a modular and flexible way are in high demand today. On the one hand, the services must be flexible enough to be reused in a variety of contexts. On the other hand, they must be specific enough so that their composition may be provably consistent. The existing technologies (WS-CDL, WSCI and session types) require a behavioural contract associated with each service, which is impossible to derive automatically. Furthermore, neither technology supports flow inheritance: a mechanism that automatically and transparently propagates data through service pipelines. This paper presents a novel mechanism for automatic interface configuration of such services. Instead of checking consistency of the behavioural contracts, our approachfocuses solely on that of data formats in the presence of subtyping, polymorphism and flow inheritance. The paper presents a toolchain that automatically derives service interfaces from the code and performs interface configuration taking non-local constraints into account. Although the configuration mechanism is global, the services are compiled separately. As a result, the mechanism does not raise source security issues despite global service availability in adaptable form.Peer reviewe

Synthesis of Attributed Feature Models From Product Descriptions

International audienceMany real-world product lines are only represented as non-hierarchical collections of distinct products, described by their configuration values. As the manual preparation of feature models is a tedious and labour-intensive activity, some techniques have been proposed to automatically generate boolean feature models from product descriptions. However , none of these techniques is capable of synthesizing feature attributes and relations among attributes, despite the huge relevance of attributes for documenting software product lines. In this paper, we introduce for the first time an algorithmic and parametrizable approach for computing a legal and appropriate hierarchy of features, including feature groups, typed feature attributes, domain values and relations among these attributes. We have performed an empirical evaluation by using both randomized configuration matrices and real-world examples. The initial results of our evaluation show that our approach can scale up to matrices containing 2,000 attributed features, and 200,000 distinct configurations in a couple of minutes

A Model-Based Approach to the Software Configuration of Integrated Control Systems

Software product-line engineering is a paradigm for developing software applications through reuse and mass customization. A product family provides a repository of reusable components, where each component has a number of configurable features. Product development in this context is done through configuration, which is the process of selecting and customizing the reusable components according to the specific needs of a particular product. Software product-lining has been extensively applied in the design and development of integrated control systems, which are large-scale, heterogeneous, and hierarchical systems typically used in the oil and gas domain. Due to the complexity of such systems, the lack of concise abstractions, and inadequate automation support, product configuration, in the integrated control systems domain, is typically error-prone and laborious. In this thesis, we identify and formulate the configuration challenges in the integrated control systems domain, and propose a model-based semi-automated configuration approach to overcome those challenges. Our solution to the configuration problems consists of a UMLbased modeling methodology, named SimPL, and a semi-automated configuration approach. The SimPL methodology enables creating concise abstractions of families of integrated contro

Efficient Architecture-Level Configuration of Large-Scale Embedded Software Systems

International audienceConfiguration is a recurring problem in many domains. In our earlier work, we focused on architecture-level configuration of largescale embedded software systems and proposed a methodology that enables engineers to configure products by instantiating a given reference architecture model. Products have to satisfy a number of constraints specified in the reference architecture model. If not, the engineers have to backtrack their configuration decisions to rebuild a configured product that satisfies the constraints. Backtracking configuration decisions makes the configuration process considerably slow. In this paper, we improve our earlier work and propose a backtrack-free configuration mechanism. Specifically, given a cycle-free generic reference architecture model, we propose an algorithm that computes an ordering over configuration parameters that yields a consistent configuration without any need to backtrack. We evaluated our approach on a simplified model of an industrial case study.We show that our ordering approach eliminates backtracking. It reduces the overall configuration time by both reducing the required number of value assignments, and reducing the time that it takes to complete one configuration iteration. Furthermore, we show that the latter has a linear growth with the size of the configuration problem

Architecture-Level Configuration of Large-Scale Embedded Software Systems

Configuration in the domain of integrated control systems (ICS) is largely manual, laborious, and error-prone. In this paper, we propose a model-based configuration approach that provides automation support for reducing configuration effort and the likelihood of configuration errors in the ICS domain. We ground our approach on componentbased specifications of ICS families. We then develop a configuration algorithm using constraint satisfaction techniques over finite domains to generate products that are consistent with respect to their ICS family specifications. We reason about the termination and consistency of our configuration algorithm analytically. We evaluate the effectiveness of our configuration approach by applying it to a real subsea oil production system. Specifically, we have rebuilt a number of existing verified product configurations of our industry partner. Our experience shows that our approach can automatically infer up to 50% of the configuration decisions, and reduces the complexity of making configuration decisions