Multi-view modeling and automated analysis of product line variability in systems engineering

Product Lines (PL) in the systems engineering (SE) domain are one of the largest and most complex ones. The sheer number of different products that can be derived from PL points out to the scale of the challenge that Product Line Engineering (PLE) faces. Various development artifacts describe PL but due to their diversity, variability modeling across PL is a challenging task. Moreover, this complexity is a major obstacle for achieving traceability across PL which is especially important for product verification. In order to support systems engineering by establishing traceability across PL and aid verification planning we propose Multi-View Variability Model (MVVM). MVVM introduces a set of variability models that represent variability in various development artifacts, e.g. architecture, requirements etc. and corresponding inter-model constraints. We provide a formalization of MVVM and perform a transformation of the MVVM model to a Constraint Satisfiability Problem (CSP) where we formulate queries for the CSP model in order to extract information about variability dependencies among MVVM views. Throughout the paper we use a real system from the automotive domain as the working example in order to illustrate the introduced concepts.