A framework for automated multi-stage and multi-step product configuration of cyber-physical systems

Product line engineering (PLE) has been employed to large-scale cyber-physical systems (CPSs) to provide customization based on users’ needs. A PLE methodology can be characterized by its support for capturing and managing the abstractions as commonalities and variabilities and the automation of the configuration process for effective selection and customization of reusable artifacts. The automation of a configuration process heavily relies on the captured abstractions and formally specified constraints using a well-defined modeling methodology. Based on the results of our previous work and a thorough literature review, in this paper, we propose a conceptual framework to support multi-stage and multi-step automated product configuration of CPSs, including a comprehensive classification of constraints and a list of automated functionalities of a CPS configuration solution. Such a framework can serve as a guide for researchers and practitioners to evaluate an existing CPS PLE solution or devise a novel CPS PLE solution. To validate the framework, we conducted three real-world case studies. Results show that the framework fulfills all the requirements of the case studies in terms of capturing and managing variabilities and constraints. Results of the literature review indicate that the framework covers all the functionalities concerned by the literature, suggesting that the framework is complete for enabling the maximum automation of configuration in CPS PLE.