From feature models to decision models and back again an analysis based on formal transformations

In Software Product Line Engineering, variability modeling plays a crucial rule. Over the years, a couple of different modeling paradigms with a plethora of different approaches have been proposed. However, only little attention was spent to compare these concepts. In this paper, we compare the capabilities and expressiveness of basic feature modeling with basic decision modeling. In this paper, we also present a formalization of basic decision modeling and show that in combination with a powerful constraint language both approaches are equivalent, while in their very basic forms they are not equivalent. These results can be used to transfer existing research results between the two paradigms.