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Measuring the structural complexity of feature models

Published: 11 November 2013 Publication History

Abstract

The automated analysis of feature models (FM) is based on SAT, BDD, and CSP - known NP-complete problems. Therefore, the analysis could have an exponential worst-case execution time. However, for many practical relevant analysis cases, state-of-the-art (SOTA) analysis tools quite successfully master the problem of exponential worst-case execution time based on heuristics. So far, however, very little is known about the structure of FMs that cause the cases in which the execution time (hardness) for analyzing a given FM increases unpredictably for SOTA analysis tools. In this paper, we propose to use width measures from graph theory to characterize the structural complexity of FMs as a basis for an estimation of the hardness of analysis operations on FMs with SOTA analysis tools. We present an experiment that we use to analyze the reasonability of graph width measures as metric for the structural complexity of FMs and the hardness of FM analysis. Such a complexity metric can be used as a basis for a unified method to systematically improve SOTA analysis tools.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASE '13: Proceedings of the 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
November 2013
765 pages
ISBN:9781479902156
  • General Chair:
  • Ewen Denney,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Tevfik Bultan,
  • Andreas Zeller

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IEEE Press

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Published: 11 November 2013

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Author Tags

  1. automated analysis
  2. feature model
  3. performance measurement
  4. software product line

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ASE '13
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ASE '13: Automated Software Engineering
November 11 - 15, 2013
CA, Silicon Valley, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 82 of 337 submissions, 24%

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