View Specific Visualization of Proofs for the Analysis of Variant Development Structures. Grumbach, L. In Transdisciplinary Lifecycle Analysis of Systems - Proceedings of the 22nd \ISPE\ Inc. International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, Delft, The Netherlands, July 20-23, 2015, of Advances in Transdisciplinary Engineering, pages 204–213, 2015. IOS Press. ©2015 © The authors and IOS Press.
View Specific Visualization of Proofs for the Analysis of Variant Development Structures [pdf]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
The importance of variant development structures has increased continuously over the past few years. Nowadays the keyword is mass customization. Manufacturers have to satisfy the personal needs of their clients to keep up with competitors. Individual wishes and increasing demands of customers require the possibility of flexible and nearly limitless adaptations of a product. The result is a diversity of variants in one product line. Issues occur during the development of the corresponding development structures that were related to the complexity of the arising product data. Not only the amount of functionality and therefore individual components is rising, but also the interrelationships among the single components are getting more complex. The number of new evolving variants once a feature is added increases in the worst case exponentially. The resulting complexity cannot be handled manually. Thus, a formal logic based approach has to be used to describe the underlying variability model of the product structure. These formal specifications provide a basis for algorithms, which analyse the structures in terms of finding all kinds of errors like inconsistencies or dead features. Such results include formal proofs, which reason about the derivation of the found errors. As the users who construct and manage the development structures typically have no expert knowledge about formal languages and proofs, the analysis output has to be represented in a role and user-specific way. The presented work concentrates on an approach to visualize the formal results in an understandable, adaptable and user-oriented fashion. Different concepts are elaborated, which cover the information needs of specific user groups to match their respective knowledge level. As feature models are used to represent variant development structures in a simple and compact manner, they are used as a basic visualization technique. Other views represent the proof, in fact a resolution graph, a proof tree and a proof step. One possibility to understand the proof is to simulate through the individual steps. Each of the features and relationships, which play a role in the current step, are highlighted in the feature model. The mapping between proof steps and features and their relationships simplifies the comprehension. Based on these concepts a prototype is implemented, whose functionality respects the common human computer interaction requirements. To conclude, the result is summarized and prospects on future increments, further concepts and possible improvements are given.

Downloads: 0