Feature models, grammars, and propositional formulas

Abstract

Feature models are used to specify members of a product-line. Despite years of progress, contemporary tools often provide limited support for feature constraints and offer little or no support for debugging feature models. We integrate prior results to connect feature models, grammars, and prepositional formulas. This connection allows arbitrary prepositional constraints to be defined among features and enables off-the-shelf satisfiability solvers to debug feature models. We also show how our ideas can generalize recent results on the staged configuration of feature models. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.