J. Cleland-Huang, A. Agrawal, M. Nafee Al Islam, E. Tsai, M. Van Speybroeck, M. Vierhauser: Requirements-Driven Configuration of Emergency Response Missions with Small Aerial Vehicles, 24th ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference (SPLC ’20), October 19–23, 2020, MONTREAL, QC, Canada, online. Doi: 10.1145/3382025.3414950
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used by emergency responders to support search-and-rescue operations, medical supplies delivery, fire surveillance, and many other scenarios. At the same time, researchers are investigating usage scenarios in which UAVs are imbued with a greater level of autonomy to provide automated search, surveillance, and delivery capabilities that far exceed current adoption practices. To address this emergent opportunity, we are developing a configurable, multi-user, multi-UAV system for supporting the use of semi-autonomous UAVs in diverse emergency response missions. We present a requirements-driven approach for creating a software product line (SPL) of highly configurable scenarios based on different missions. We focus on the process for eliciting and modeling a family of related use cases, constructing individual feature models, and activity diagrams for each scenario, and then merging them into an SPL. We show how the SPL will be implemented through leveraging and augmenting existing features in our DroneResponse system. We further present a configuration tool, and demonstrate its ability to generate mission-specific configurations for 20 different use case scenarios.