Leveraging Models at Run-Time to Retrieve Information for Feature Location

Model Driven Engineering (MDE) has the potential to be used at run-time, to monitor and verify particular aspects of run-time behaviour. Models at run-time provide a kind of formal basis for reasoning about the current system state at run-time, for reasoning about necessary adaptations, and for analyzing or predicting the consequences of possible system adaptations. However, we believe that models at runtime paradigm can be useful in other research areas such as variability extraction and feature location. This work proposes the use of models at run-time for increasing the information for feature location. We have tried this work with a Smart Hotel defined with an architecture model at run-time and driven by a reconfiguration loop. The results indicate that the models at run-time paradigm generates information that can be used in the area of feature location. In addition, the results show that there is potential in combining these two research areas: models at run-time and feature location.