Search-based many-to-one component substitution

Nicolas Desnos (1) , Marianne Huchard (2) , Guy Tremblay (3) , Christelle Urtado (1) , Sylvain Vauttier (1)

1 LGI2P - Laboratoire de Génie Informatique et Ingénierie de Production
2 MAREL - Models And Reuse Engineering, Languages
3 Département d'informatique [Montréal]

In this paper, we present a search-based automatic many-to-one component substitution mechanism. When a component is removed from an assembly to overcome component obsolescence, failure or unavailability, most existing systems perform component-to-component (one-to-one) substitution. Thus, they only handle situations where a specific candidate component is available. As this is not the most frequent case, it would be more flexible to allow a single component to be replaced by a whole component assembly (many-to-one component substitution). We propose such an automatic substitution mechanism, which does not require the possible changes to be anticipated and which preserves the quality of the assembly. This mechanism requires components to be enhanced with ports, which provide synthetic information on components' assembling capabilities. Such port-enhanced components then constitute input data for a search-based mechanism that looks for possible assemblies using various heuristics to tame complexity.

Mots clés: component substitution; component assembly evolution; search-based building process; many-to-one component replacement; heuristics; dead components

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Nicolas Desnos, Marianne Huchard, Guy Tremblay, Christelle Urtado, Sylvain Vauttier. Search-based many-to-one component substitution. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution, 2008, 20 (5), pp.321-344. ⟨10.1002/smr.377⟩. ⟨lirmm-00322877⟩