System product line engineering for small appliances with driver derivation

Advances in device technology have promoted the development of small appliances such as wearable devices, IoT equipment, and small home electronics equipment. Considering a product family of such device/equipment, each product in the family may have different hardware (micro controller unit, devices such as sensors and actuators, and different configurations). Software for such equipment tends to be compact and handles the devices directly via drivers. However, software engineers are not familiar with driver development and this causes development bottleneck. Therefore, in order to develop products efficiently, derivations of software and hardware are not enough, i.e., the systematic derivation of drivers is indispensable. In this paper, we propose a system product line development method for small appliances in which drivers are systematically derived. In this method, hardware features and software features are managed in terms of feature models, and system products are derived by specifying features of hardware and software. Based on these, drivers are systematically derived. This paper proposes 1) an extension of the UML/MARTE model that can represent hardware information that is necessary for driver generation, and 2) a systematic driver derivation method based on variability management and model-driven engineering techniques. We evaluate the method using an example of a motion tracking system product family.