A multi-level approach for supporting configurations: A new perspective on software product line engineering

Configuration is a common way in many markets to cope with reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction. There are various approaches to represent product configurations, the most common of which is feature modeling. However, feature models suffer from principal limitations, including ambiguity and lack of abstraction, increasing maintainability effort and limiting lifecycle support. In this paper, we suggest using a multi-level modeling approach to improve flexibility, reuse, and integrity and demonstrate the advantages of the approach over feature modeling.