Research On Ontology-based Consistency Verification For Evolving Feature Models And Its Applications

With the change of domain software requirement, the domain software is more and more complex.It is a challenge for analyzing and modeling the requirement in the domain engineering research.Considering the relativity and stability of domain engineering, the Feature-Oriented Domain Analysismethod takes features as core assets of the domain. However, the change of the requirement leads tothe evolution of feature model. How to verify the consistency of evolving feature model is becominga new point of research.To solve the above problem, an ontology-based method for evolving feature model consistencyverification is proposed in this paper.Firstly, an ontology-based feature meta-model and its constraints are proposed by extracting andanalyzing basic concepts involved in the evolving feature model. A set of the evolving operations isproposed for describing the evolution of feature model.Secondly, an ontology-based approach for evolving feature model consisteny verification isproposed on the basis of the meta-model and its constraints. Evolution strategies are represented foreliminating inconsistency of product feature model.Finally, in order to support software product line, a case tool for feature model consistencyverification is designed and implemented with Jena inference engine. According to the meta-model,we take the system of quality evaluation as example and build an ontology-based domain featuremodel for it in the airborne domain. Then, we cut the ontology-based domain feature model into anontology-based product feature model. At the same time, the consistency of the ontology-basedproduct feature model is verified by the tool. The result of the case of the airborne domain in thispaper illustrates the effectiveness of our method.