Morphological Zwicky Boxes vs. Feature Model

Two perspectives of the same problem: Configuration.

Zwicky Box

The idea of morphological analysis goes back to Fritz Zwicky, a swiss astro physicist, who introduced them for the first time for the structuring and efficient presentation of ideas.
The term morphology derives from classical Greek and means the study of shape. It is a creative heuristic method to wrap one’s mind around a problem and helps to find solutions unprejudiced. It focuses on the structure and arrangement of parts of an object.
Essentially, general morphological analysis is a method for identifying and investigating the total set of possible relationships or configurations contained in a given problem complex and is therefore used to model variants of components.
It is designed to be created in groups and therefore is adequate to be built in interdisciplinary teams. Attributes are defined and written one below the other. The attributes are independent from each other. After that the manifestations of the attribute are placed next to the attributes, by which a matrix is created, in which every combination of manifestations of all attributes is a possible solution.

The first step of the approach is defining or identifying the dimensions of the problem complex to be investigated, and assigning each parameter a range of relevant manifestations. A morphological box, also known as Zwicky box, is constructed by setting the parameters against each other in an n-dimensional matrix.
Thus, each cell of the zwicky box is a configuration of the problem complex.

To make it more understandable, we construct a Morphological Zwicky Box for a real-world issue.

Domains contains the values, which can be assigned to the attribute. The attribute material contains the domains black, red and blue and material contains alluminium, steel and titan.
As desribed above, the

Feature Model

The focus of Feature Oriented Domain Analysis is the identification of reusable, parameterized features of a software systems in a domain, which includes Context Analysis, Domain Modelling, Architecture Modelling, and its limitations. The cardinality-based feature modeling notation is presented which is an extension of several other extensions of the feature model. Thereby the lower and upper bound of the number of subfeatures can be set. This enables not just the variability, but also restriction with concrete constraints within this visual notation, which is a good basis to model a product line in this context.