Formal Modeling of Product-Line Variant Requirements

Formal verification of variant requirements has gained much interest in the software product line (SPL) community. Feature diagrams are widely used to model product line variants. However, there is a lack of precisely defined formal notation for representing and verifying such models. This paper presents an approach to modeling and verifying SPL variant feature diagrams using first-order logic. It provides a precise and rigorous formal interpretation of the feature diagrams. Logical expressions can be built by modeling variants and their dependencies by using propositional connectives. These expressions can then be validated by any suitable verification tool. A case study of a Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system variant feature model is presented to illustrate the verification process.