Towards a generic quality optimisation framework for component-based system models

Designing component-based systems (CBS) that exhibit a good trade-off between multiple quality criteria is hard. Even after functional design, many remaining degrees of freedom of different types (e.g. component deployment, component selection, server configuration) in the CBS span a large, discontinuous design space. Automated approaches have been proposed to optimise CBS models, but they only consider a limited set of degrees of freedom, e.g. they only optimise the selection of components without considering the deployment, or vice versa. We propose a flexible and extensible formulation of the design space for optimising any CBS model for a number of quality properties and an arbitrary number of degrees of freedom. With this design space formulation, a generic quality optimisation framework that is independent of the used CBS metamodel can apply multi-objective metaheuristic optimisation such as evolutionary algorithms.