The increasing amount of variability in software
systems led to a situation where the complexity of variability
management becomes a primary concern during software
development. Variability has been recognized as the key to
systematic and successful reuse. In family-based approaches, like
software product families, variability is a means to handle the
inevitable differences amongst systems in the family while
exploiting the commonalities and thus increases the reusability of
software. The present research provided a model for creating
variability of family of products of mobile phones, using
Ontology Web Language semantic technology, to address the
need of minimizing the cost of a new software development. The
model developed allowed the reuse of components to assemble a
new product. In this research, Phone X family of products was
considered and, an ontology was built for it using Resource
Description Framework schema. The variability design was
implemented using ASP.Net and C# programming language. The
result showed that the model was able to produce phones, each
with different components options.
I. P. Oladoja : Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology Akure,
Nigeria.
O. S. Adewale : Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology Akure,
Nigeria.
A. T. Adesuyi : Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology Akure,
Nigeria.
T.Fakoya : Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Technology Akure,
Nigeria.
Variability
Ontology
Family of Products
Pricing
Mobile phones
This research work showed some direct benefits of
adopting semantic web technologies to manage and price
product families and this was made possible by
representing feature models as OWL axioms.The
consistency of the family architecture can be checked
automatically and this enabled the configuration tool to
create only consistent packages. The problem of
redundancy among highly similar families was solved
using rules to infer the best family taxonomy and using the
inheritance mechanism. It seems that the semantic
technologies really helped to handle the family of products
concept by the family architectures consistency and by
improving the coherence of the new product created by the
product engineering phase. This research work has
introduce variability concept into family of product; which
satisfied the need to define components of a product that
differentiated it from the other; which also enhanced
centralization of pricing of family of product. This
research also rendered ontological approach to variability
of family of product on rule based, such that a product is
made-up of components, and each component has a unique
price.
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