A Multi-Agent Approach to Product
Configuration
Carlos Roberto Marques Junior
[email protected]
Staged Configuration
• A Feature Model describes the configuration space of a
system family.
• The process of specifying a family member may be
performed in stages.
• In each stage, some configuration choices are done.
Resulting in a subset of the initial Feature Model
• This Process is called Staged Configuration.
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Configuration vs. Specialization
• Configuration
– consists of the features that were selected according to the
variability constraints defined by the feature diagram.
– The relationship between a feature diagram and a configuration
is comparable to the one between a class and its instance in
object-oriented programming.
• Specialization
– is a process to transform a feature diagram and yields another
feature diagram, such that this last diagram denotes a set of
configurations that is a subset of the first one.
– A fully specialized feature model denotes only one
configuration.
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Staged Configuration
• The need for staged configuration arises in at least three
contexts:
– Software Supply Chains;
– Optimization;
– Policy Standards
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Software Supply Chain
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Optimization
• Staged configuration offers an opportunity to perform
optimizations based on partial evaluation.
• When certain configuration information becomes available at
some stage and it remains unchanged thereafter, the
software can be optimized.
• For example, configuration information available at compiletime can be used to eliminated unused code.
• Optimizations are especially interesting for embedded
software and software that need to be distributed through a
network connection.
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Policy Standards
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Feature Model with Decision Sets e Roles
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Proposal
• Use a Multi-Agents approach to help the stakeholders to
configure the feature model.
• Study techniques to resolve conflicts where there is some
dependencies between features.
• Extend the work from static configuration to dynamic
reconfiguration.
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Proposal
Referências
•
Czarnecki, K., Helsen, S. & Eisenecker, U. (2004b), Staged configuration
using feature models, in R. L. Nord, ed., ‘Proceedings of the Third Software
Product-Line
Conference
(SPLC
2004),
Boston,
MA,
USA,
August/September 2004’, Vol. 3154 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Springer-Verlag.
•
K. Czarnecki, S. Helsen, and U. Eisenecker. Staged configuration through
specialization and multi-level configuration of feature models. Software
Process Improvement and Practice, 10(2):143–169, 2005.
•
M. Mendonca, D. D. Cowan, T. Oliveira, A Process-Centric Approach for
Coordinating Product Configuration Decisions, HICSS, p. 283a, 2007.
•
Mendonca, M., Oliveira, T., Cowan, D.D.: Collaborative Product
Configuration in Software Product Lines – Formalization and Dependency
Analysis, Journal of Software, ISSN 1796-217X, vol. 3, issue 2, pp. 69-82,
February 2008.
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A Multi-Agent Approach to Product
Configuration
Carlos Roberto Marques Junior
[email protected]