Evolution Support for Custom Variability Artifacts Using Feature Models: A Study in the Cyber-Physical Production Systems Domain

Abstract

Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) are constantly evolving, highly configurable, complex software-intensive systems interacting with their environment. The variability of CPPSs must be well-documented to foster reuse, for which the Software Product Line (SPL) community proposed variability models. Unfortunately, industry is mostly unaware of existing variability modeling approaches and frequently develops custom artifacts to document variability, e.g., spreadsheets or Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs). In contrast to SPL variability models, the evolution of these custom artifacts is hardly researched and evolving them remains a tedious and error-prone manual task in practice. In this paper, using two CPPS case studies, we investigate the impact of system evolution on custom artifacts and feature models as a basis for further research. We discuss how feature models could benefit the evolution of DSL-based variability artifacts.