Towards a Search-based Interactive Configuration of Cyber Physical System Product Lines

Product Line Engineering (PLE) is a technique to improve the quality and productivity of developing (via configuration) Cyber Physical Systems (CPSs). A CPS often contains many heterogeneous components with complex constraints relevant to product configuration in the context of PLE. Manual configuration is error-prone and has low productivity since managing and manipulating such constraints in a real industrial context is very complicated and thus warrants an automated solution. However, fully automated solution is often impossible for CPSs since some decisions must be made manually by users, thus requiring an interactive configuration solution. Therefore, we propose a semi-automated and interactive configuration solution for CPSs. We started our research by analyzing the characteristics of three industrial CPS product lines and constraints required for supporting such a configuration solution. Then we conducted some pilot experiments on applying search algorithms to find optimal decision orders for configuring a product. In this poster, we describe the whole research idea and, discsusion on the work we have completed, the initial results, and the future plan.