A formal semantics for feature cardinalities in feature diagrams

Feature cardinalities in feature diagrams determine the number of times a feature and its subtree can be duplicated during configuration by an operation named "cloning". Other authors already investigated the problem and published different proposals of semantics for this construct. However, this previous work is not easily amenable to the formal study of the various properties of feature diagrams and their derived configurations. Also, cross-tree constraint languages still need to be properly extended to account for feature cardinalities. This paper presents an extension of an earlier formal semantics of feature diagrams by adding support for feature cardinalities.

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