Bidirectional migration between variability and commonality in product line engineering of smart homes

Abstract

The product line engineering (PLE) has proven to be the paradigm for developing diversified products and systems in shorter time, at lower cost, and higher quality. Ultimately the goal of PLE is to evolve a set of products that have both commonality and variations built into them, which allows a high degree of variability between the different products. The current trend in smart home deployment—based on commissions—guarantees a complete satisfaction for each inhabitant, as designed per resident basis. To reduce high deployment cost and to resolve the non-reusability of the resources, the product line engineering methodology can be employed in selecting or configuring the appropriate smart home technology. Within the smart homes and ambient assisted living, not only do the reusable features reduce cost, they also do not compromise with the guarantee of complete satisfaction of each resident as few senior inhabitants may impose severe constraints on the binding of few common features. In our previous work (Sharma et al., 9th International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics (ICOST), 2011), we propose an approach called, wrenching that claims the best resident satisfaction at the reduced deployment cost. Today seniors are fast growing population globally (http://www.aoa.gov/agingstatsdotnet/Main_Site/Data/2008) and the increased demand for smart homes in the near future is undeniable. Thus to provide assistance and independence to each senior resident of a smart home, reduction in time to market (Wohlin and Ahlgren, Softw Qual J 4:189–205, 1995) of appropriate assistive smart home technology becomes an essential consideration. Long term analysis of variability binding can help to analyze that few variants are bound more often over others. Respecting the satisfaction guarantee, the highly demanded variants can be permanently migrated into commonality, advocating the reusability. The improved reusability of features (e.g., sensors) not only enhances economy of scale but also time to market. The migration of a feature from variability to commonality is known as realizing.