Representation of Software Product Line Architectures for search-based design

Abstract

The Product-Line Architecture (PLA) is the main artifact of a Software Product Line (SPL). Search-based approaches can provide automated discovery of near-optimal PLAs and make its design less dependent on human architects. To do this, it is necessary to adopt a suitable PLA representation to apply the search operators. In this sense, we review existing architecture representations proposed by related work, but all of them need to be extended to encompass specific characteristics of SPL. Then, the use of such representations for PLA is discussed and, based on the performed analysis, we introduce a novel direct PLA representation for search-based optimization. Some implementation aspects are discussed involving implementation details about the proposed PLA representation, constraints and impact on specific search operators. Ongoing work addresses the application of specific search operators for the proposed representation and the definition of a fitness function to be applied in a multi-objective search-based approach for the PLA design.