The Software Product Line (SPL) engineering aims at modeling and developing a set of software systems with similarities rather than individual software systems. Modeling task can be, however, tedious or even infeasible for large scale and complex SPLs. To address such a problem, the modeling task is distributed among different stakeholders. At the end, the models separately developed have to be composed in order to obtain the global SPL model. Composing SPL models is not a trivial task; variability information of model elements has to be treated during the composition, as well as the variability constraints. Similarly, the model structure and the composition semantics are key points that have to be considered during the composition. This thesis aims at providing specific mechanisms to compose SPL models. Therefore, we propose two composition mechanisms: the merge and the aggregation mechanisms. The merge mechanism aims at combining models including structural similarities. The aggregation mechanism, however, intends to compose models without any structural similarity but having eventual constraints across their structural elements. We focus on UML composite structures of SPLs and use specific annotations to identify variable elements. Our composition mechanisms deal with the variability information of structural elements, the variability constraints associated with the variable elements as well as the structures of the manipulated models. We also specify a set of semantic properties that have to be considered during the composition process and show how to preserve them. At the end, we have carried out an assessment of the proposals and have showed their ability to compose SPL models in a reasonable time. We have also showed how model consolidation is important in reducing le number of products having incomplete structure.
