Multiple Software Product Lines for Service Oriented Architecture

Combining the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software Product Line (SPL) paradigms is an emerging research area that has gained a considerable interest in recent years. We observe that the approaches proposed in the literature address mostly the variability modeling of Service Providers (SPs) (e.g., developing and composing SPs). However, handling the variability of Service Consumers (SCs) and how to interrelate the variability of SCs and SPs have not been studied. In this paper, our objective is to carry out an in-depth and rigorous study that addresses these issues. We propose a new model-based, top-down, formal and end-to-end SOA approach based on the Multiple SPLs (MSPL) paradigm. The main idea is to develop an MSPL composed of two dependent SPLs for SP and SC in order to generate customized, valid and consistent SPs and SCs. We propose that the variability of each SPL is managed by a Feature Model (FM). In order to ensure the consistency between these two SPLs and in particular between their FMs, we define the automated analysis update operator based on formal propositional logical techniques. We developed a tool that implements all the required steps of our approach and we demonstrate its efficiency in a practical case study.