Wrenching: Transient migration from commonality to variability in product line engineering of smart homes

Abstract

Currently smart home are created and deployed on each user's specifications, which guarantees their complete satisfaction, but incurs a very high deployment cost and non-usable resources. Techniques from product line engineering provide a framework to promote resource reusability by identifying reusable common features. They help to reduce the cost but can compromise users' satisfaction, especially when they need special accommodations or have unique preferences. In this paper, we propose wrenching, a transient relaxation of common features into variability, so uncommon, ad hoc request can be satisfied. Based on wrenching, we further devise Smart Variability Model, that can accommodate situations where existing models are not applicable. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.