This paper presents a case study of migration to software product line development of automotive body parts from clone-and-own development at Aisin Seiki, an automotive body parts supplier. Feature analysis was conducted to recover the objectives of specification items, namely requirements, lost in the documents, and then separation of abstraction levels and concerns of the specification items and description of dependencies among the specification items were conducted. The results of the feature analysis provided guidance for structured analysis and development with data flow and state transition analyses to rebuild the product line architecture. These activities reduced the impact ratio of software structural changes for the targeted product to one-eighth of the conventional one and the development cost required for a variant to one-third than before. The costs required for these activities were recovered after the release of the third variant.

The paper reports authors' experience in teaching software product lines (SPL) for senior engineers in the company. An effective way for education in the experience is to teach SPL as a paradigm consisting of some key ideas and show how we can introduce the paradigm into the development process. The authors have used PLUS as a reference of such development process. Feature modeling is taught not only as a means of variability modeling but also as a means to facilitate construction of abstraction hierarchy and separation of concerns. Giving anti-patterns of feature modeling and countermeasures to them helps engineers discuss construction of better feature models.

In the region of Japan, broadband network and informatization have spread. However the field of agriculture has not come willingly. The infrastructure that has not been enough in mountainous areas, but various initiatives of computerization are being started using production and distribution as the subjects. Since this began in reality, there are still insufficient matters that have been resolved in regards to the technical validations and cost effectiveness. Therefore necessitates pouring in a tremendous amount of expertise, possibility is ICT and its related technologies of sensors. In our research and developments, we create demo hardware for the experiment using in the farm collected data. On the other hand, making study group with farmers for accumulation of data and experience. That visualized information configure to the platform of knowledge management.

Reducing the energy consumed in the use of smart phones has become a major challenge for application developers. While this problem can be addressed at various levels, it is important to reduce the energy consumption of individual applications which can vary greatly depending on the behavior of the application. Energy profiling methods are required in order to identify the points in which the applications are consuming excessive energy and to examine how to reduce overall energy consumption by applications.

In this paper, we propose name resolution middleware that involves positional awareness to identify target hosts in wireless visible area communication (WVAC). WVAC is a wireless communication network that enables users to exchange information with nearby hosts, especially within the users' visible area, wherein the underlying network can be locally and temporarily constructed without the aid of any centralized administration. In such communication, the proposed middleware assists the user to intuitively identify a target host by presenting the relative positional relationship among the neighbor hosts. The middleware possesses the following characteristics: (1) it provides simple APIs to be easily utilized by various applications, (2) a dedicated server preliminarily located in the network is not required to operate it, and (3) it adopts a positioning method that could estimate the relative locations of neighbor hosts without any pre-configuration. Finally, we construct a prototype system and evaluate the middleware using this system. The results indicate that this middleware can sufficiently work even on resource-limited mobile devices.

In this paper, we propose three heuristics for high-efficiency selections of MPRs (multipoint relays) in link state QoS routing protocol: MIMS (maximizing integration metric selection), MQES (maximizing QoS-efficiency selection), and MCIS (minimizing cost-inefficiency selection). The basic approach of these selections is to determine a smaller set of MPRs that provide better QoS paths between any two nodes. The main objective in doing so is to maximize the QoS (quality of service) effect while limiting routing overhead for flooding control traffic. In addition, we evaluate the performance of the routing protocols with the proposed selections by simulation. The results indicate that the proposed methods achieve high-efficiency selection; as compared to an existing MPR selection taking into account the QoS requirements, MIMS reduces the maintenance cost by 30%, while the throughput of the resultant path is decreased by 13%, and MCIS reduces the cost by 21% without any decrease in the throughput.

This paper reports an experimental case study constructing an IP phone product line with the PLUS method. The IP phone product line equips a graphical user interface and interacts with the network. Its behavior is complicated, state dependent, and feature dependent. The original PLUS domain engineering process requires to perform dynamic interaction modeling among objects or finite state machine modeling for objects based on use case descriptions without any comprehensive view of the product line system behavior. However, use case descriptions are too abstract to capture the system behavior of the complicated system. To alleviate this abstraction level gap, we introduce system level finite state machine modeling to provide a comprehensive view describing the feature dependent behavior of the product line system as a finite state machine. That made use case descriptions sounder and dynamic interaction modeling and finite state machine modeling easier in our case study.

In this paper we propose product line based component unification to reuse works required for component unification such as combined tests, WCET estimation, etc. and properties produced by component unification such as documents, binaries etc. We perform a case study of the personal destination screen with personal identification and find that component unification is worth to consider in product line engineering. Moreover, we present a sketch of an algorithm, which we expect to use in product line engineering tools, to exploit candidate components to be unified for strategic reuse along the product line with the feature model diagram of FORM product line engineering.