An aspect-oriented approach for implementing evolutionary computation applications

Abstract

Object-oriented frameworks support design and code reuse for specific application domains. To facilitate the development of evolutionary computation (EC) programs, such as genetic algorithms, developers often extend and customize EC frameworks with application code that defines the EC problem being solved. The application code, however, crosscuts the EC framework whenever candidate solutions are encoded, decoded, evaluated, and output. A change in the application logic, such as adding a parameter to the problem being solved, requires additional changes across code that extends the framework. This paper presents Arachne, an aspect-oriented approach for developing EC programs that extracts the crosscutting concerns of an application code into aspects that can be woven into the EC framework at compile time. To facilitate applying Arachne, we implemented a prototype tool to support the automatic generation of aspect code for two widely used EC frameworks, JGAP and ECJ. We demonstrate Arachne by applying it to re-engineer EC benchmark programs and an industry-provided problem.