An architecture-centric development approach for service-oriented product lines

Service-Oriented Product Line (SOPL), which combines Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Software Product Line (SPL) concepts and technologies, has attained an increasing interest in software engineering community in recent years. However, there are still several challenges we have to overcome when developing a SOPL. In this paper, an architecture-centric approach for SOPL development is proposed to alleviate these challenges. First, the business process execution language (BPEL) based architecture style and architecture description language bpel4Arch are developed. Then, based on them, a model-driven reference architecture generating method and a common rule engine based architecture customization approach are proposed. For facilitating the translation between application architecture and BPEL, we also provide an optimal partition for application architecture by applying the mixed integer programming (MIP) technique, which can achieve the entire function of target product with minimum molecular services. Finally, an initial case study on E-Shopping domain and some evaluations show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed approach.