The Variability Exchange Language (Draft Version)
The current draft version of the Variability Exchange Language has been developed in the project SPES_XT by the partners Daimler AG, pure-systems GmbH, and the Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems FOKUS. The project SPES_XT has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) from May 2012 to April 2015. One result of the project works is the present draft version of a specification of the Variability Exchange Language, that is intended to be standardized within OASIS in the near future.
A Generic Data Exchange Format for Variant Management

Without VariabilityAPI, many APIs need to be implemented
There is currently no standardized API available for such operations. Hence, a variant management tool needs to implement a separate interface – and possibly a new data format as well – for each new artifact. Worse, each variant management tool needs to do this separately. With m variant management tools and n artifacts, this may require the implementation of up to m x n different interfaces.

With VariabilityAPI, only a single API needs to be implemented
In this project, we present a generic API (VariabilityAPI) that allows variant management tools to communicate with artifacts through a standardized interface. If implemented across both variant management tools and artifacts, this may reduce the number of required implementations significantly. A generic interface typically also lowers the barrier for adding new artifacts, and fosters the introduction of new tools for variant management.
- Variation points may be locations in an artifact which are removed or set inactive in a binding process. This is implemented by defining a condition for each variation point.
- Variation points may be parameters. Such variation points provide expressions which are used by the binding process to assign a value to the parameter.