Managing SPL Variabilities in UAV Simulink Models with Pure: : variants and Hephaestus

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are vehicles that fly without a pilot and are able to execute different types of missions, such as surveillance, topographical data collection, and environment monitoring. This motivates some degree of variability in the controlling software of UAV – usually specified using Simulink models –, even though it is also possible to reuse software in this domain using systematic approaches such as Software Product Lines (SPLs). In this paper we present a catalog of patterns to represent variable features in Simulink and show how to construct a simple software product line for an UAV. We also show mechanisms and an infrastructure for configuring Simulink assets, using two tools to manage variabilities: Pure::variants and Hephaestus. These tools are also compared according to a set of characteristics.