Introduction

Feature models (FMs) are an established means for representing variability and commonality properties of software product lines and beyond (e.g., financial services and configurable products such as furniture, cars, and cyber-physical systems). Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays an increasingly important role in supporting feature modelling tasks, FM analysis, and FM configuration. In this chapter, we explain our major motivation for writing this book. We provide a short overview of the history of feature modelling specifically focusing on the relationship between feature modelling related tasks and AI methods. We discuss relevant benefits of applying FMs and refer to further topics with a relationship to feature modelling.We conclude this chapter with an overview of the major topics of in this book.