Handling Safety-Related Feature Interaction in Safety-Critical Product Lines

The variation management of software product lines is currently handled without adequately taking safety or other system-level properties into account. This is largely due to (1) the fact that the available product-line variation-management techniques lack sufficient support for representing the combined effect of different features, and (2) the existing feature interaction techniques do not suffice for handling one-to-many feature interactions typical of many safety-critical product lines. The challenge is that we need to track the safety-related feature interactions while still promoting reuse. The expected contribution of this work is to demonstrate how safety-related feature interactions can be better investigated and managed by the safety-analysis guided, model-based approach described in this paper.