Evaluating variability modeling techniques for supporting cyber-physical system product line engineering

Modern society is increasingly dependent on Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) in diverse domains such as aerospace, energy and healthcare. Employing Product Line Engineering (PLE) in CPSs is cost-effective in terms of reducing production cost, and achieving high productivity of a CPS development process as well as higher quality of produced CPSs. To apply CPS PLE in practice, one needs to first select an appropriate variability modeling technique (VMT), with which variabilities of a CPS Product Line (PL) can be specified. In this paper, we proposed a set of basic and CPS-specific variation point (VP) types and modeling requirements for proposing CPS-specific VMTs. Based on the proposed set of VP types (basic and CPS-specific) and modeling requirements, we evaluated four VMTs: Feature Modeling, Cardinality Based Feature Modeling, Common Variability Language, and SimPL (a variability modeling technique dedicated to CPS PLE), with a real-world case study. Evaluation results show that none of the selected VMTs can capture all the basic and CPS-specific VP and meet all the modeling requirements. Therefore, there is a need to extend existing techniques or propose new ones to satisfy all the requirements.