Search based design of software product lines architectures

The Product-Line Architecture (PLA) is the main artifact of a Software Product Line (SPL). However, obtaining a modular, extensible and reusable PLA is a people-intensive and non-trivial task, related to different and possible conflicting factors. Hence, the PLA design is a hard problem and to find the best architecture can be formulated as an optimization problem with many factors. Similar Software Engineering problems have been efficiently solved by search-based algorithms in the field known as Search-based Software Engineering. The existing approaches used to optimize software architecture are not suitable since they do not encompass specific characteristics of SPL. To easy the SPL development and to automate the PLA design this work introduces a multi-objective optimization approach to the PLA design. The approach is now being implemented by using evolutionary algorithms. Empirical studies will be performed to validate the neighborhood operators, SPL measures and search algorithms chosen. Finally, we intend to compare the results of the proposed approach with PLAs designed by human architects.