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A metamodel for modeling system features and their refinement, constraint and interaction relationships

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Abstract

This paper presents a metamodel for modeling system features and relationships between features. The underlying idea of this metamodel is to employ features as first-class entities in the problem space of software and to improve the customization of software by explicitly specifying both static and dynamic dependencies between system features. In this metamodel, features are organized as hierarchy structures by the refinement relationships, static dependencies between features are specified by the constraint relationships, and dynamic dependencies between features are captured by the interaction relationships. A first-order logic based method is proposed to formalize constraints and to verify constraints and customization. This paper also presents a framework for interaction classification, and an informal mapping between interactions and constraints through constraint semantics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Hong Mei, Wei Zhang & Haiyan Zhao

Authors
  1. Hong Mei
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  2. Wei Zhang
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  3. Haiyan Zhao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong Mei.

Additional information

Communicated by B. Schärtz and I. Krüger

Hong Mei received the BSc and MSc degrees in computer science from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively, and the PhD degree in computer science from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 1992. He is currently a professor of Computer Science at the Peking University, China. His current research interests include Software Engineering and Software Engineering Environment, Software Reuse and Software Component Technology, Distributed Object Technology, and Programming Language. He has published more than 100 technical papers.

Wei Zhang received the BSc in Engineering Thermophysics and the MSc in Computer Science from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA), China, in 1999 and 2002, respectively. He is currently a PhD student at the School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science of the Peking University, China. His research interests include feature-oriented requirements modeling, feature-driven software architecture design and feature-oriented software reuse.

Haiyan Zhao received both the BSc and the MSc degree in Computer Science from the Peking Univeristy, China, and the Ph.D degree in Information Engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan. She is currently an associate professor of Computer Science at the Peking University, China. Her research interests include Software Reuse, Domain Engineering, Domain Specific Languange and Program Transformation.

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Mei, H., Zhang, W. & Zhao, H. A metamodel for modeling system features and their refinement, constraint and interaction relationships. Softw Syst Model 5, 172–186 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-006-0004-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-006-0004-1

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