Automated planning for feature model configuration based on stakeholders' business concerns

In Software Product Line Engineering, concrete products of a family can be generated through a configuration process over a feature model. The configuration process selects features from the feature model according to the stakeholders' requirements. Selecting the right set of features for one product from all the available features in the feature model is a cumbersome task because 1) the stakeholders may have diverse business concerns and limited resources that they can spend on a product and 2) features may have negative and positive contributions on different business concern. Many configurations techniques have been proposed to facilitate software developers' tasks through automated product derivation. However, most of the current proposals for automatic configuration are not devised to cope with business oriented requirements and stakeholders' resource limitations. We propose a framework, which employs an artificial intelligence planning technique to automatically select suitable features that satisfy the stakeholders' business concerns and resource limitations. We also provide tooling support to facilitate the use of our framework.