Design Patterns for Integrating Variability in Timed Automata

Products nowadays come in large number of variants, that allow to tailor products to the specific requirements of the customer. In the production process it is desirable to re-use the common core of product variants, and spend the main effort for an invariant in the development of the individualization of the product. This is true for all kinds of industrial products, including software systems and there specifically embedded systems. Formal approaches in software development are a good way to specifiy products so that common and individual parts can easily be identified. Model based approaches like UML have become widespread in software production. However, model based approaches normally do not support variability management and need to be extended to deal with product variants. For embedded systems, timed automata are a well-established specification formalism. We describe how to extend timed automata to support variability management, and show how a timed automata tool like Uppaal can be used in variability management.