Formalizing feature selection problem in software product lines using 0-1 programming

Software Product Line (SPL) Engineering analyzes and applies various existing software modules from different systems in a domain for software mass customization. Feature models are often used to represent all of the product configurations in an SPL in terms of features. A main challenge in SPLs is how to select a good feature set to achieve customer requirements, subject to the constraints of feature model as well as the resource constraints. To solve it, this paper presents an approach to formalize the feature selection problem using 0-1 programming. Moreover we document the problem formalization in canonical form. Our approach makes it possible that most existing techniques for 0-1 programming can be used directly to deal with the feature selection problem in SPLs, which provides a new perspective to solve the problem and improve the efficiency.