Automating Product-Line Variant Selection for Mobile Devices

Product-line architectures (PLAs) designed for mobile devices create a unique challenge for automated product variant selection engines since variants must be derived on-the-fly as devices are discovered. Current automation techniques do not incorporate device resource consumption constraints into variant selection and do not address how a PLA can be designed to improve automated variant selection speed. 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. The paper presents our results from experiments with Scatter and how PLA design decisions affect a constraint-based variant selection engine's solving speed.