Collaborative and Distributed Product
Configuration: An Agent-Based Approach
Carlos Roberto Marques Junior
[email protected]
Elder José Reioli Cirilo
[email protected]
Motivation
• The paradigm of software development based on Software
Product Line (SPL) has emerged as an interesting approach
to software factories.
• Several benefits are achieved with the use of LPS.
– Reduction in development cost;
– Increase Quality;
– Reduced Time-to-Market;
– Reduction in maintenance effort;
– Better cost estimation;
– among others….
Motivation
• Feature Modeling
– Compact representation of all the products of an SPL in terms
of features;
– describes the configuration space of a system family;
– Widely used to SPL representation.
Motivation
Problems with Product Configuration
• As long as the problem domain gets bigger, the feature
model becomes more complex.
• Product configuration might require the participations of
many stakeholders, each one with his expertise.
• Unfortunately, current configuration technology is
essentially single-user-based and translated in configuration
decisions by the product manager.
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Collaborative and Distributed Product
Configuration
• No pre-processing to synchronize the participation of
stakeholders.
• The process of configuration is dynamic.
• The approach is agent-based.
• The approach transfers the responsibility of reasoning about
the constraints, the communication and the conflict
resolution to the agents.
• The agents are able to produce suggestions to make the
configuration valid (in relation to the constraints of the
feature model), in case some constraint was violated.
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Libertas: Approach Overview
Instance 2
GUI
Instance 1
Model
UA
GUI
UA
PCMA
Model
Model
UA
Model
GUI
Instance n
GUI
Libertas: Architecture Overview
Libertas: Graphical User Interface
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Feature Model -> Constraint Satisfaction Problem
Variables: vf1, vf2, vf3, vf4 e vf5
C
S
f1
A
f2
vf1, vf2, vf3, vf4 e vf5 E {0,1}
Dependency Constraints:
vf4 vf5
S
S
S
f4
f5
f4
f3
f4
Hierarchical Constraints:
vf3 vf2
vf4 vf2
Feature Model Constraints:
vf2 vf3 ^ vf4
Feature Model -> Constraint Satisfaction Problem
Proposal
• Code improvements;
• Extend the feature model representation;
• Optimal configuration recommendation;
– Agents reason on the feature model constraints and suggest
the best configuration
• Documentation
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References
•
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.
Collaborative and Distributed Product
Configuration: An Agent-Based Approach
Carlos Roberto Marques Junior
[email protected]
Elder José Reioli Cirilo
[email protected]