Automating Product-Line Variant Selection for Mobile Devices
Jules White, Douglas C. Schmidt, Egon Wuchner, Andrey Nechypurenko · 2007
Product-line architectures (PLAs) designed for mobile devices create a unique challenge for deployment and configuration (D&C) planning engines. A D&C planning engine captures the unique OS, middleware, and hardware signature of the device and rapidly finds a valid variant of the PLA that can be supported by the configuration in terms of OS, middleware, and available resources, such as memory. It is hard to develop a D&C engine for a PLA that can both capture the numerous nuanced requirements of a PLA’s variant construction rules and the unique characteristics of a large number of mobile devices. It is even harder to fin a valid variant to deploy to the target device fast enough to support automatic deployment in an ad-hoc environment. This paper presents a tool called Scatter whose input is (1) the requirements of PLA construction and (2) the resources available on a discovered mobile device and whose output is the optimal variant that can be deployed to the device. Scatter provides automatic variant selection based on configuration and resource constraints and also ensures that variant selection is optimal with regard to a configurable cost function. 1.