Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
variation is not high, this is a good solution; but in many real
situations, this is not acceptable. Thus, we need to introduce
concepts and constructs to solve this issue.
Weproposetoimprovetheexpressivepowerofvariabilityby
providing a mechanism we have named
fine-grained variations
between products of an MD-SPL. For instance,the first Smart-
Home system can have a fine-grained variation in relation
to the second Smart-Home system if both systems have
automatic windows,but they may differ in the specific windows
that are automatic. Additionally, we propose a mechanism to
create
fine-grained configurations
,which allows us to configure
modelelementsindividuallybasedonfeatures.Forexample,by
creating a fine-grained configuration, we could configure the
mainRoom
to manage
Air Conditioning
as environmental
control and the
livingRoom
to manage
Automatic Windows
as environmental control [ARB 09].A coarse-grained variation
can be viewed as a “class variation” conversely, a fine-grained
variation is an “instance variation” that is specific to one
instance of a concept.The product line architect has to analyze
the domain variability, to choose between coarse-grained
and fine-grained variations accordingly with its structural
metamodel.
To solve the problem of fine-grained configuration, one
can define metaconcepts associated with every relevant
combination of features and structural elements. For instance,
we can have a metaconcept of
RoomWithAutomaticWindow
and
RoomWithManualWindow
. However, this is not a scalable
approach and we propose a more definitive solution. The
solution is to define links between features and particular
elements of the structural model. However,we should continue
to propose coarse-grained variation in a context where group
features and cardinality are possible. Thus, we need to
add some constraints to avoid illegal configurations and a
mechanism to check the configuration validity.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search