The Quest for Formal Methods in Software Product Line Engineering

Software product line engineering (SPLE) aims to alleviate the complexity by providing a set of systems with well‐defined commonalities and variabilities. SPLE offers a commercially successful approach that can improve both time to market and quality. A major limiting factor of quality assurance in existing SPLE practice is the heterogeneity of modeling formalisms in different development phases. The modeling language should be capable of expressing all relevant system aspects and their variability based on a common formal semantics. The modeling framework should contain rich behavioral specification mechanisms in addition to structural description techniques that allow for modeling and reasoning about system behavior. Variability modeling to represent system diversity is integral to a uniform modeling framework. Modularization allows splitting the product line model into manageable parts to alleviate design complexity. The abstract behavioral specification language (ABS) is an integrated modeling language comprising variability modeling with structural and behavioral system modeling