Collaborative and Distributed Product Configuration: An Agent-Based Approach Carlos Roberto Marques Junior [email protected] Elder José Reioli Cirilo.

Collaborative and Distributed Product Configuration: An Agent-Based Approach

Carlos Roberto Marques [email protected]

Elder José Reioli [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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• 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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Collaborative and Distributed Product Configuration

Model

Model

Model

UA

UA

UA

PCMA

Instance 1

Instance n

Instance 2

GUI

GUI

GUIModel

GUI

Libertas: Approach Overview

Libertas: Architecture Overview

Libertas: Graphical User Interface

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Feature Model -> Constraint Satisfaction Problem

C

S

A

S

S

S

f1

f2

f3

f4

f4

Variables: vf1, vf2, vf3, vf4 e vf5

vf1, vf2, vf3, vf4 e vf5 E {0,1}

Dependency Constraints: vf4 vf5

Hierarchical Constraints:

vf3 vf2

vf4 vf2

Feature Model Constraints: vf2 vf3 ^ vf4

f4 f5

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 [email protected]

Elder José Reioli [email protected]