Towards an ontology-based approach for deriving product architectures

Abstract

Software product line (SPL) engineering has proven to improve software quality and shorten costs and development time. An important aspect in the product line development process involves variability, which is the ability of a system for being customised, changed, or extended. Approaches are required for modelling and resolving variability as well as for verifying the selections. In this paper, we outline our ongoing research towards an approach that automates the derivation of product architectures from an SPL architecture. The proposed approach relies on ontology-based reasoning and model-driven techniques, the former supports the validation of the generated architectures and the generation of the transformation rules while the latter realises the actual target product architectures. We sketch our approach with a voice over IP case example. Copyright © 2011 ACM.