Implementing a System Generation Aware Unified Conceptual Model

Nowadays, customers expect highly configurable products, which can be developed using the approach of product lines. Product lines describe different product variants and versions of these variants, thus expressing variability in space through variants and variability in time through versions. A product line can be divided into problem space, where the user-visible characteristics or behaviours of a product, called features, and their dependencies are described, and the solution space, which represents the realisation artefacts. The state of the art reveals the following unsolved challenges: the lack of validation and realisability testing of variants over time, and the lack of a single instrument that provides a solution to this challenge and is also compatible with established tools. In this thesis, we approach the described challenges by extending an existing metatmodel, the UCM. Therefore, we propose an implementation of the UCM, which we extend by integrating existing concepts for expressing variability in space in order to adapt our implementation to known tools, such as FeatureIDE. We also integrate the concepts of delta modelling to describe the difference between two versions in the UCM, and we use the model of SGE variation types to categorise changes for further analysis with nominal types. ... mehrWe show the applicability of our implementation by reproducing a realisation analysis on an extension of the well-known BCS Case Study. We use the extended BCS to show that we can apply the SGE variation types to a cross-domain product line, and show that our UCM implementation correctly describes the semantic difference between two versions by performing a realisation analysis using the UCM instance that describes the version by deltas.