Efficient consistency checking of scenario-based product-line specifications

Modern technical systems typically consist of multiple components and must provide many functions that are realized by the complex interaction of these components. Moreover, very often not only a single product, but a whole product line with different compositions of components and functions must be developed. To cope with this complexity, it is important that engineers have intuitive, but precise means for specifying the requirements for these systems and have tools for automatically finding inconsistencies within the requirements, because these could lead to costly iterations in the later development. We propose a technique for the scenario-based specification of component interactions based on Modal Sequence Diagrams. Moreover, we developed an efficient technique for automatically finding inconsistencies in the scenario-based specification of many variants at once by exploiting recent advances in the model-checking of product lines. Our evaluation shows benefits of this technique over performing individual consistency checking of each variant specification.