Variability Transformation from Industrial Engineering Artifacts: An Example in the Cyber-Physical Production Systems Domain

Many variability modeling approaches have been proposed to explicitly represent the commonalities and variability in (software) product lines. Unfortunately, practitioners in industry still develop custom solutions to manage variability of various artifacts, like requirements documents or design spreadsheets. These custom-developed variability representations often miss important variability information, e.g., information required to assemble production goods. In this paper, we introduce the Variability Evolution Roundtrip Transformation (VERT) process. The process enables practitioners from the Cyber-Physical Production Systems domain to transform custom-developed engineering variability artifacts to a feature model, evolve and optimize the model, and transform it back to the original engineering artifacts. We build on an existing transformation approach for variability models and show the feasibility of the process using a real-world use case from an industry partner. We report on an initial feasibility study conducted with our industry partners' domain experts and on lessons learned regarding variability transformation of engineering variability artifacts.