Deepak Dhungana

• PhD
• Head of Department at University of Applied Sciences Krems

As software services become more and more indispensable in our daily lives, low-code and no-code platforms are gaining significance, especially for non-technical users. We present a novel domain-specific modeling language for the definition of smart service systems in the context of smart cities, which we call Smart Service Definition Language (SSD...

One of the key components of a smart production ecosystem is a marketplace that brings the different stakeholders involved in manufacturing product lines with variability requirements together. It is often not possible for a single factory to take on a production order to fully fulfill these requirements: multiple factories need to be involved and...

One of the major steps between (re-)configuration of a factory and the start of production is the commissioning phase, where certification of safety requirements and assessment of potential hazards is a key activity. Typically, assessment of safety risks is a manual process that incorporates the experience and knowledge of the involved stakeholders...

Human capabilities to interact, interfere, support, supervise and take over different tasks in a production environment are often not considered in the context of automated and self-organizing factories (smart factories). Adaptive Task Sharing (ATS) is a method to combine the strengths of automation and human skills to provide flexible and resilien...

Training for small and medium enterprises, especially in the context of leadership and digitalisation, has been traditionally carried out in form of presence workshops. Like other learning and training offers, this type of training needed to be carried out virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing advantages as well as disadvantages. Further...

Human capabilities to interact, interfere, support, supervise and take over different tasks in a production environment are often not considered in the context of automated and self-organizing factories (smart factories). Adaptive Task Sharing (ATS) is a method to combine the strengths of automation and human skills to provide flexible and resilien...

An important prerequisite for determining whether a certain product is pro-ducible in any given production facility is an accurate assessment of which production lines and/or the machines are able to execute the necessary production steps. Not only the static information about the capabilities of the machines, but also the conditions of machines an...

An important prerequisite for determining whether a certain product is producible in any given production facility is an accurate assessment of which production lines and/or the machines are able to execute the necessary production steps. Not only the static information about the capabilities of the machines, but also the conditions of machines and...

The possibility to create an additional or alternative experience for tourists using Virtual Reality (VR) has considerable potential in marketing, as an alternative to physical visits, as well as an enriching factor of a real-world experience. However, the positive experience in VR can be quickly marred by lack of usability, unmerited task load, or...

Training for small and medium enterprises, especially in the context of leadership and digitalisation, has been traditionally carried out in form of presence workshops. Like other learning and training offers, this type of training needed to be carried out virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing advantages as well as disadvantages. Further...

It is getting increasingly difficult for factories to provide the required flexibility to support lot-size-one production orders. Therefore, collaboration is especially important for manufacturing companies to ensure that they do not lose manufacturing contracts because they can only partially fulfill the requirements of their customers. This paper...

It is getting increasingly difficult for factories to provide the required flexibility to support lot-size-one production orders. Therefore, collaboration is especially important for manufacturing companies to ensure that they do not lose manufacturing contracts because they can only partially fulfill the requirements of their customers. This paper...

Traditionally, product configuration and production configuration processes are executed separately by different stakeholders in different phases of the product life cycle. With increasing demand for individualized products, the need for flexible production processes, modular factories and intelligent production infrastructures is also increasing....

Die vorliegende Publikation dokumentiert die Ergebnisse des vom Österreichischen Klima- und Energiefonds geförderten Projekts Transform+, einem der zahlreichen Projekte, in dem die Stadt Wien in Kooperation mit unterschiedlichen AkteurInnen innovative Ansätze für eine zukunftsorientierte Stadtentwicklung erarbeitet. Das Projekt startete im März 201...

Smart production aims to increase the flexibility of the production processes and be more efficient in the use of resources. Two important pillars of this initiative are "smart products" and "smart factories". From the perspective of product line engineering, these can be seen as two product lines (product line of factories and product line of good...

In this paper we discuss the opportunities of adopting RDF stream processing in the context of smart cities. As a concrete example we take the Aspern Smart City Research project – one of the largest smart city projects in Europe – which aims at overcoming silos in smart grid and smart building domains. We present the envisioned smart ICT infrastruc...

Context: In industrial settings products are developed by more than one organization. Software vendors and suppliers commonly typically maintain their own product lines, which contribute to a larger (multi) product line or software ecosystem. It is unrealistic to assume that the participating organizations will agree on using a specific variability...

When developing large-scale industrial software systems engineers need to instantiate, configure, and deploy diverse reusable components. The number of component instances required depends on customer requirements only known during configuration and is typically unknown when modeling the systems’ variability. Also, the hierarchy of dynamically crea...

Welcome to SPLC 2014, the 18th International Software Product Line Conference. SPLC is the premier forum for practitioners and researchers to present and discuss novel ideas, research results, experiences as well as issues and problems in the field. This year, the program of the conference consists of a variety of exciting events such as keynote ta...

Engineers developing large-scale industrial software systems need to instantiate, configure, and deploy many different types of reusable components. The number of component instances required is typically unknown when defining the systems' architecture and variability but depends on customer requirements only known during configuration. The hierarc...

Software solutions in complex environments, such as railway control systems or power plants, are assemblies of heterogeneous components, which are very large and complex systems themselves. Interplay of these systems requires a thorough design of a system-of-systems (SoS) encompassing the required interactions between the involved systems. One of t...

Rule-based specifications of systems have again become common in the context of product line variability modeling and configuration systems. In this paper, we define a logical foundation for rule-based specifications that has enough expressivity and operational behavior to be practically useful and at the same time enables decidability of important...

There have been several proposals to describe the variability of software product lines by using modeling languages. In larger organizations or projects (e.g., multi product line environments) this can lead to a situation where multiple variability modeling techniques are used simultaneously. Rather than enforcing a single modeling language, we pre...

One of the greatest barriers on the way to the efficient creation, handling, and evolution of product lines is the complexity and scale of the underlying artifacts. In this context, the MAPLE/SCALE workshop focuses on the investigation of scalability issues and the application of model-driven concepts and techniques in software product line enginee...

Software Product Lines (SPL) are an engineering technique to efficiently derive a set of similar products from a set of shared assets. In particular in conjunction with model-driven engineering, SPL engineering promises high productivity benefits. There is however, a lack of support for systematic management of SPL evolution, which is an important...

Many organizations providing products with common features wish to take advantage of that similarity in order to reduce development and maintenance efforts. Their goal is to move from a single-system development paradigm towards a product line approach. However, this transition is not trivial and requires a systematic scoping phase to decide how th...

The MAPLE workshop focuses on the application of concepts and techniques from Model-driven Software Engineering (MDSE) in Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE). A particular focus is on techniques that allow to derive products from a product line more efficiently in order to maximize the return on investment and realize the expected benefits of...

Software Product Lines (SPL) are systematic approach to develop families of similar software products by explicating their commonalities and variability, e.g., in a feature model. Using techniques from model-driven development, it is then possible to automatically derive a concrete product from a given configuration (i.e., selection of features). H...

Systematic reuse of artifacts and a clear understanding of the variability within a product family are key success concepts within diverse industrial domains. Nevertheless, there are still many open issues regarding adapting and tailoring of software product line engineering approaches to specialized domains. The nature of ERP systems would suggest...

Open Source Software (OSS) project managers often need to observe project key indicators, e.g., how much efforts are needed to finish certain tasks, to assess and improve project and product quality, e.g., by analyzing defect data from OSS project developer activities. Previous work was based on analyzing defect data of OSS projects by using correl...

Existing feature modeling approaches and tools are based on classical constraint satisfaction which consists of a fixed set of variables and a fixed set of constraints on these variables. In many applications however, features may not only be selected but cloned so that the numbers of involved variables and constraints are not known from the beginn...

Many of the benefits expected from software product lines (SPL) [1-2] are based on the assumption that the additional investment required for domain engineering, pays off during application engineering when products are derived from the product line [3]. However, to fully exploit this we need to optimize application engineering processes and handle...

In industrial settings, products are rarely developed by one organization alone. Software vendors and suppliers typically maintain their own product lines, which can contribute to a larger (multi) product line. The teams involved often use different approaches and tools to manage the variability of their systems. It is unrealistic to assume that al...

Global Software Development (GSD) research has reached a level of maturity. Paper-based solutions and guidelines are readily available to solve many known distributed software development problems. The large number of recommendations can present a confusing picture to the practitioner. The Global Teaming Model (GTM), captures key global software pr...

Service-based systems need to provide flexibility to adapt both to evolving requirements from multiple, often conflicting, ephemeral and unknown stakeholders, as well as to changes in the runtime behavior of their component services. Goal-oriented models allow representing the requirements of the system whilst keeping information about alternatives...

[Context and motivation] Product line variability models have been primarily used for product configuration purposes. We suggest that such models contain information that is relevant for early software engineering activities too. [Question/Problem] So far, the knowledge contained in variability models has not been used to improve requirements elici...

The variability of a product line is typically defined in models. However, many existing variability modeling approaches are rigid and don’t allow sufficient domain-specific adaptations. We have thus been developing a flexible and extensible approach for defining product line variability models. Its main purposes are to guide stakeholders through p...

Typical complex software and systems engineering projects involve a set of different engineering disciplines and therefore heavily rely on systems integration approaches. Ser-vice-oriented architecture and Enterprise Service Bus provide a valuable basis for systems integration; however often depend on tedious manual work or invasive and therefore i...

Software product line engineering (SPLE) promises order-of-magnitude improvements in time-to-market, cost, productivity, quality, and other business drivers. Many of these expected benefits are based on the assumption that the additional investment for setting up a software product line pays off during application engineering. However, to fully exp...

To leverage the explicit and extensive reuse of shared software artefacts, many companies use a product line approach to build different variants of their products for use within a variety of systems. Product lines can be large and could easily incorporate thousands of elements together with diverse relationships among them. This makes product line...

Collaborative development of software products across organisational boundaries in software ecosystems adds new challenges to existing software engineering processes. We propose a new approach for handling the diverse software artefacts in ecosystems by adapting features from social network sites. We promote artefacts to first-class citizens in suc...

The use of the term ecosystem in the context of extensible software platforms and third-party developers or user communities has made us ponder about the similarities between software ecosystems and natural ecosystems. We therefore compare software ecosystems and natural ecosystems to present an agenda for further research by analyzing some key cha...

ContextNumerous approaches are available for modeling product lines and their variability. However, the long-term impacts of model-based development on maintenance effort and model complexity can hardly be investigated due to a lack of empirical data. Conducting empirical research in product line engineering is difficult as companies are typically...

The scale and complexity of product lines means that it is practically infeasible to develop a single model of the entire system, regardless of the languages or notations used. The dynamic nature of real-world systems means that product line models need to evolve continuously to meet new customer requirements and to reflect changes of product line...

Companies successfully applying product line approaches often follow a long-term strategy and need to plan product portfolios years ahead. For instance in the automotive industry, managers constantly make decisions about future product evolution, like "the LED tail lights will be introduced with the next facelift and the LED front lights two years...

ContextAn increasing number of publications in product line engineering address product derivation, i.e., the process of building products from reusable assets. Despite its importance, there is still no consensus regarding the requirements for product derivation support.ObjectiveOur aim is to identify and validate requirements for tool-supported pr...

Developers of software engineering tools are facing high expectations regarding capabilities and usability. Users expect tools tailored to their specific needs and integrated in their working environment. This increases tools' complexity and complicates their customization and deployment despite available mechanisms for adaptability and extensibili...

Researchers are often inspired by ingenious problem solving strategies of nature. This paper is motivated by the seemingly infinite expressive power of genes (in terms of variability). To bring in the flexibility required for dealing with variable requirements and volatile assumptions in software engineering, we consider genetic variability to be a...

Software product lines aim at reducing time-to-market and increasing quality through extensive reuse. Effective tool support is essential in product line engineering. Tools need to be flexible and adaptable to support specific needs of engineers in different domains and development contexts. As product lines cover both business and technical aspect...

Software product lines are complex and need to be maintained and evolved over many years. New customer requirements, new products derived, technology changes, and internal enhancements lead to continuous changes of the artifacts and models constituting a product line. Managing such changes therefore becomes a key issue during a product line 's evol...

Understanding and modeling the variability of an existing system is a highly critical and challenging task when adopting a product line approach. Only little guidance is available for identifying the variable ele- ments in a complex system and for choosing the ap- propriate level of granularity for modeling. Also, product line engineers have to fin...

Software maintenance and evolution are among the most challenging and cost-intensive activities in software engineering. This is not different for software product lines due to their complexity and long life-span. New customer requirements, technology changes and internal enhancements lead to the continuous evolution of a product line's reusable as...

Tool developers are facing high expectations regarding the capabilities and usability of software engineering tools. Users expect tools which are tailored to their specific needs and integrated in their environment. This increases the complexity of tools and makes their customization more difficult, although numerous mechanisms supporting adaptabil...

The current trend towards component-based software architectures has also influenced the development of industrial automation systems (IAS). Despite many advances, the life-cycle management of large-scale, component-based IAS still remains a big challenge. The knowledge required for the maintenance and runtime reconfiguration is often tacit and rel...

Product line engineering and plug-in techniques pursue different but complementary goals. Software product line engineering strives for modeling the variability of software systems on different levels of abstraction, whereas plug-in systems support software extensibility, customizability, and evolution. We present an approach demonstrating the bene...

Evolution is a permanent challenge in product line engineering. Reusable assets such as software components or documents evolve continuously due to new customer requirements or technology changes. This leads to modifications or extensions of the product line's variability models describing the reference architecture. Due to the large size of produc...

Abstract Researchers and practitioners have been developing a wide range of techniques and tools to model and man- age variability as a response to the heterogeneity of application areas and the diversity of implementation practices in different domains.,In our own,research we have been developing a tool-supported approach,to decision-oriented vari...

Variability modelling and service-orientation are im- portant approaches for achieving both the flexibility and adaptability required by stakeholders of software systems. In this paper we present an approach that integrates do- main models captured in the i* modelling framework with variability models to support runtime monitoring and adaptation of...

Deriving a product from a product line requires the involvement and cooperation of heterogeneous stakeholders such as customers, sales people, or engineers. Taking their different roles and needs into account is essential to exploit the possible benefits of product lines. In this paper we present the tool-supported product line engineering approach...

Product line engineering comprises many heterogeneous activities such as capturing the variability of reusable assets, supporting the derivation of products from the product line, evolving the product line, or tailoring the approach to the specifics of a domain. The inherent complexity of product lines implicates that tool support is inevitable to...

Product derivation is the process of constructing products from the core assets in a product line. Guidance and support are needed to increase efficiency and to deal with the complexity of product derivation. Research has, however, devoted comparatively little attention to this process. In this paper we describe an approach for supporting product d...

Deriving a product from a product line means selecting and configuring existing reusable assets to meet a particular customer's needs. The blue-sky scenario in product derivation is that all customer requirements can be satisfied by exploiting existing assets and their variability. The more realistic scenario, however, is that the customers will ha...

Variability modeling and service-orientation are important approaches that address both the flexibility and adaptability required by stakeholders of today’s software systems. Goal-oriented approaches for modeling service-oriented systems and their variability in an integrated manner are needed to address the needs of heterogeneous stakeholders an...

The article presents essays from the configuration workshop held in August 2006 as part of ECAI in Riva del Garda, Italy. The essays address reasoning techniques, user interaction, business integration, and finally presents a practical case study. These essays aim to give the readers insight into current trends and challenges in configuration. If y...

Understanding and modeling architectural variability is fundamental in product line engineering. Various extensions have been proposed to architecture description languages (ADLs) to deal with variability. Although these extensions are useful, we argue in this paper that decisions need to be treated as first-class citizens for modeling architectura...

Despite its increasing popularity the widespread adoption of product line engineering is still hampered by a lack of flexible and extensible approaches that can be tailored to deal with diverse organizational specifics such as architectural styles, languages, or modeling notations. Many existing product line approaches focus on process aspects and...

Variability modeling is at the heart of product line engineering. Variability models entail features and architectural elements, technical customization as- pects, sales and marketing decisions, as well as com- plex traceability information. In this paper we describe DecisionKing, a variability modeling tool that offers a great degree of flexibilit...

Existing methods and tools supporting product line variability management typically emphasize either the feature or the architecture level. There have been attempts to combine these aspects, but no widely accepted method is available so far. This paper reports ongoing research in designing and implementing product line variability models, where the...

Capturing and sharing architectural knowledge is already a complex endeavor when dealing with conventional software systems for single customers. In product line engineering, however, the situation is even more difficult due to architectural variability and complex relationships between features and technical solution components. In this paper, we...

Plug-in architectures and platforms represent a promising approach for building software systems which are extensible and customizable to the par- ticular needs of the individual user. For example, the Eclipse platform, as the most prominent representative of plug-in systems, is based on a unique plug-in and extensibility concept and has succeeded...

In product line engineering variability models cap- ture the commonalities and variability of core assets and guide product derivation. In large-scale systems the knowledge that is required for creating and evolv- ing variability models is typically distributed among different heterogeneous stakeholders. For example, sales people usually think in t...

Providing an environment that fosters the creation of attractive jobs is a challenge shared by all countries educating young people. Even European countries report a continuous movement of young researchers to the US and other countries. However, it is particularly challenging for developing na-tions who frequently face severe brain drain problems...

Variability modelling and service-orientation are important approaches for achieving both flexibility and adaptability required by stakeholders of software systems. In this paper, we present the MAESoS approach that utilizes goal and variability models to support runtime monitoring and adaptation of service-oriented sys-tems. We illustrate our appr...