Towards consistent specifications of product families

Abstract

Addressing the challenges faced today during the development of multi-functional system families, we suggest a service-oriented approach to formally specifying the functionality and, in particular, the functional variability already in the requirement engineering phase. In this paper, we precisely define the underlying concepts, such as the notion of individual services, the combination of services, inter-service dependencies, and variability. Thereby, we especially focus on establishing the consistency of the overall specification. To that end, we formally define conflicts between requirements and describe how they can be detected and resolved based on the introduced formal concepts. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.