An Aspect-Oriented Language for Product Family Specification

Aspect-orientation is a paradigm for managing the separation of crosscutting concerns and decomposing a system using more than one criterion. This paper proposes an aspect-oriented approach at the feature-modeling level to better handle crosscutting concerns in the modeling of product families of ambient systems.Based on the specification language of PFA (Product Family Algebra), we present a language AO-PFA (Aspect-Oriented Product Family Algebra) that extends the aspect-oriented paradigm to feature modeling. The language provides full facilities for articulating aspects, advice, and pointcuts in feature modeling. We illustrate the scope and flexibility of the proposed language through the discussion of several feature-modeling situations.