An Approach to Constructing Formal Model for Product Families

Software product family engineering is mainly used to analyze and manage product family feature models by using variability modeling. The formal specification approach is beneficial to ensure the quality of feature models. However, existing formal methods use an informal approach in the domain analysis phase and separate the variability modeling from the feature specification, which leads to consistency problems in the final product family feature models obtained. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a method to check the consistency of its results with the variability model and guide the user to solve the inconsistencies during the process of formalizing the feature, with the guidance of rule or based on it. We will give the format of the specification and the algorithm for consistency checking, and the consistency checking rule library will focus on checking the consistency of variables and functional scenarios. We give a case study to show that our approach is effective.