Product-Line Architectures (PLA)s are an emerging paradigm for developing software families for Distributed Real-time and Embedded (DRE) systems by customizing reusable artifacts, rather than handcrafting software from scratch. To reduce the effort of developing software PLAs and product variants for DRE systems, it is common to leverage general-purpose - ideally standard - middleware platforms whose reusable services and mechanisms support a range of application Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as predictability and low end-to-end latency. This paper describes systematic Model Driven Development (MDD) techniques for specializing implementations of standards-based, general-purpose middleware to support the application-specific QoS needs of different product variants created atop a PLA.

http://whitepapers.zdnet.com/abstract.aspx?docid=896597