Two Evolutionary Multiobjective Approaches for the Component Selection Problem

Component selection is a crucial problem in Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE). CBSE is concerned with the assembly of pre-existing software components that leads to a software system that responds to client-specific requirements. We are approaching the component selection problem. We formulate the problem as multiobjective, involving 3 objectives: the number of requirements satisfied, the number of used components and the cost of the involved components. We use the Pareto dominance principle to deal with the multiobjective optimization problem. We propose two different evolutionary multiobjective approaches: one is dealing with the requirements to be satisfied and the other one the the available components as solution representation. Both approaches use different evolutionary models. The experiments performed show the efficiency of the approach which deals directly with the requirements.