Exploring the variability of interconnected product families with relational concept analysis

Abstract

Among the various directions that SPLE promotes, extractive adoption of complex product lines is especially valuable, provided that appropriate approaches are made available. Complex variability can be encoded in different ways, including the feature model (FM) formalism extended with multivalued attributes, UML-like cardinalities, and references connecting separate FMs. In this paper, we address the extraction of variability relationships depicting connections between systems from separate families. Because Formal Concept Analysis provides suitable knowledge structures to represent the variability of a given system family, we explore the relevance of Relational Concept Analysis, an FCA extension to take into account relationships between different families, to tackle this issue. We investigate a method to extract variability information from descriptions representing several inter-connected product families. It aims to be used to assist the design of inter-connected FMs, and to provide recommendations during product selection.