Incremental Consistency Analysis in Cyber-Physical Product Lines

A product line refers to a collection of related products that share a set of commonalities but also allow for variability to accommodate specific customer requirements. In the context of cyber-physical systems, a product line comprises both a problem space, representing user-visible features, and a solution space, representing technical implementations. Maintaining consistency between these two spaces is crucial, as it ensures that every valid configuration in the problem space can be successfully realized in the solution space. As cyber-physical product lines evolve, repeatedly analyzing all configurations, as done by a product-based approach, becomes impractical due to combinatorial growth of the configuration space. To address this scalability issue, this thesis conceptualizes and evaluates an incremental consistency analysis approach. This approach employs delta modeling to systematically represent evolutionary changes, allowing reanalysis to focus solely on modified parts of the product line. An optimization called the dominates check further reduces computational effort by identifying a set of dominating configurations for subsequent analyses. ... mehrEvaluating the incremental approach using a case study representing the evolution of a product line demonstrates substantial performance improvements, achieving notable runtime reductions and speedups compared to a product-based approach. These results underscore that the incremental approach not only enhances runtime performance but, more importantly, provides the scalability required to support consistency analysis across the evolution of cyber-physical product lines.