Collaborative Context Features for Critical Systems

Feature models and their extensions have been proposed and used over the past 20 years for modeling the commonality and variability of software systems. However, the increasing runtime demands and post-deployment configuration procedures of self-adaptive, context-aware and pervasive systems has brought the need for modeling context features. In addition, many critical systems that demand stringent collaborative features at runtime need also to share information dynamically. In this research-in-progress paper, we sketch our vision of where feature modeling should go to support collaborative aspects of systems. Our proposal suggests identifying and annotating context features models with collaborative information that becomes particularly useful for critical and swarm-based systems that require information exchange at runtime.