Int. J. Knowledge Engineering and Soft Data Paradigms, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2013 1 Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Towards detecting redundancy in domain engineering process using first order logic rules Abdelrahman Osman Elfaki*, Sim Liew Fong, Kevin Loo Teow Aik and Md Gapar Md Johar Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Management and Science University, University Drive, Off Persiaran Olahraga, Section 13, 40100 Shah Alam, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia E-mail: abdelrahman_elfaki@msu.edu.my E-mail: lfsim@msu.edu.my E-mail: Kevin@msu.edu.my E-mail: gapar@msu.edu.my *Corresponding author Abstract: Software product line (SPL) is an emerging methodology for developing software products. SPL consists of two processes: domain-engineering and application-engineering. Successful software product is highly dependent on the validity of a domain engineering process. Therefore, validation is a significant process within the domain-engineering. Anomalies such as dead feature, redundancy, and wrong-cardinality are well-known problems in SPL. In the literature, redundancy did not take the signs of attentions as a dead feature and wrong-cardinality. The maturity of the SPL can be enhanced by detecting and removing the redundancy from the domain engineering. This paper proposes first order logic (FOL) rules for detecting the redundancy in domain-engineering process. Detecting redundancy in the domain engineering direct is our contribution. Our methodology comprised of three steps: 1 variability is modelled in the form of predicates as a prerequisite 2 for each type of the redundancy, a general form is formulated to swathe all possible cases 3 FOL rules are illustrated to implement each possibility based on deducing the results from predefined cases. As a result, all forms of redundancies in the domain-engineering process are amorphous. Finally, experiments are conducted to attest the scalability of our method. Keywords: software product line; SPL; domain engineering; variability. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Elfaki, A.O., Fong, S.L., Aik, K.L.T. and Johar, M.G.M. (2013) ‘Towards detecting redundancy in domain engineering process using first order logic rules’, Int. J. Knowledge Engineering and Soft Data Paradigms, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp.1–20. Biographical notes: Abdelrahman Osman Elfaki is currently a Senior Lecturer at Management and Science University in Malaysia. He has been involved in many projects and researches related to software engineering in different countries which refined his software engineering experience in both practical and academic fields. His current interests are modeling software product lines engineering and managing variability. He has published many papers related to his current interest.