An ontological Rule-Based Approach for Software Product Lines Evolution

A software product line usually constitutes a long-term investment and, therefore, has to undergo continuous evolution to correct, improve, or extend assets or products. Software Product Line (SPL) evolution needs to gather product line knowledge to be able to successfully conduct evolution solutions. Despite various attempts, applying SPL evolution proposals remains limited and no promising approach has been proposed to evolve product lines under a common knowledge management framework. Ontologies emerge as one of the most appropriate knowledge management tools for supporting knowledge representation, processing, storage and retrieval. Given great importance to knowledge for product line evolution, and the potential benefits of managing SPL knowledge, we propose an evolution-oriented knowledge management approach. This approach provides a continuous evolution of SPLs by means of an ontological rule-based knowledge management framework. The framework delivers formal semantics and evolution rules to help evolving SPLs by using a core ontology. This ontology, kernel of the framework, represents a common conceptualization of SPLs knowledge. It encompasses three sub-ontologies to consider knowledge of SPLs requirements, architecture and traceability. In this paper, we present our approach, the associated framework and the sub-ontology associated to SPLs requirements knowledge. This sub-ontology manages knowledge associated to Feature Models, as a key requirement model of SPLs. Based on the Electric Parking Brake system, the paper proposes some improvements and evolution rules of the associated Feature Model considering the proposed framework.