Evolution in Model-Driven Software Product-Line Architectures

This chapter describes our approach to modeldriven engineering (MDE)-based product line architectures (PLAs) and presents a solution to address the domain evolution problem. We use a case study of a representative software-intensive system from the distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems domain to describe key challenges when facing domain evolution and how we can evolve PLAs systematically and minimize human intervention. The approach uses a mature metamodeling tool to define a modeling language in the representative DRE domain, and applies a model transformation tool to specify model-tomodel transformation rules that precisely define metamodel and domain model changes. Our approach automates many tedious, time consuming, and error-prone tasks of model-to-model transformation, thus significantly reducing the complexity of PLA evolution.