A feature-oriented approach to developing dynamically reconfigurable products in product line engineering

Dynamic product reconfiguration refers to making changes to a deployed product configuration while a system is running. Recently, there have been increasing demands for dynamic product reconfiguration in various application areas (e.g., ubiquitous computing, self-healing systems, etc.); however, most product line engineering methods in the literature have focused on the development of reusable core assets for statically configured products. In this paper, we propose a feature-oriented approach to developing dynamically reconfigurable core assets. This approach takes feature binding analysis results as a key design driver for identifying and managing variation points of dynamically reconfigurable products. We also provide a conceptual model for a reconfigurator, which monitors and manages product reconfiguration at run time. The method is illustrated with a home service robot product line example.