Supporting Variability Management in Cyber-Physical Production Systems: Towards Semi-Automatic Delta Model Mining for IEC 61499

Cyber-Physical Production Systems (CPPSs) are complex, highly-configurable systems interacting with their environment by sensors and actuators. Software in CPPS typically exists in a plethora of variants, developed to fulfill customer and technology requirements, which have to be maintained over a long time. Support for variability management can foster systematic reuse and configurability, but this requires a significant investment of resources to explicitly document or model variability. Additionally, we need to define the reusable engineering artifacts and their variability corresponding to the documents or models. Furthermore, the documents or models need to be maintained and kept consistent with the artifacts evolving frequently. In this short paper, we propose to (semi-)automatically capture delta models describing differences be-tween CPPS control software variants and support generating these variants based on a product line platform. Specifically, we envision a change recording mechanism and model comparison approaches for control software developed using IEC 61499, a domain-specific modeling language used for developing distributed control in CPPSs. We argue that both approaches can significantly reduce the development and maintenance effort for delta models.