Abstract
At universities, some fields of study offer multiple branches to graduate in. These branches are defined by mandatory and optional courses. Configuring a branch manually can be a difficult task, especially if some courses have already been attended. Hence, a tool providing guidance on choosing courses is desired. Feature models enable modelling such behaviour, as they are designed to define valid configurations from a set of features. Unfortunately, the branches contain constraints instructing to choose at least k out of n courses in essence. Encoding some of these constraints naïvely in propositional calculus is practically infeasible. We develop a new encoding by combining existing approaches. Furthermore, we report on our experience of encoding the constraints of the computer science master at TU Braunschweig and discuss the impact for research on configurability.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Moritz Kappel, Chico Sundermann, Timo Günther, Marc Kassubeck, Jan-Philipp Tauscher, and Moritz Mühlhausen for reviewing our paper in the earlier stages. Additional thanks go to the SEFM reviewers for giving very detailed and constructive remarks.
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Bittner, P.M., Thüm, T., Schaefer, I. (2019). SAT Encodings of the At-Most-k Constraint. In: Ölveczky, P., Salaün, G. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11724. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30446-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30446-1_7
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