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Software Product Line (SPL) engineering is a software engineering paradigm that exploits the commonality between similar software products to reduce life cycle costs and time-to-market. Many SPLs are critical and would benefit from efficient verification through model checking. Model checking SPLs is more difficult than for single systems, since the number of different products is potentially huge. In previous work, we introduced Featured Transition Systems (FTS), a formal, compact representation of SPL behaviour, and provided efficient algorithms to verify FTS. Yet, we still face the state explosion problem, like any model checking-based verification. Model abstraction is the most relevant answer to state explosion. In this paper, we define a novel simulation relation for FTS and provide an algorithm to compute it. We extend well-known simulation preservation properties to FTS and thus lay the theoretical …