Search Based Design of Layered Product Line Architectures

The adoption of the layered architectural style can improve the Product Line Architecture (PLA) design by providing a better organization of the elements, flexibility and maintainability. Search based optimization approaches can also benefit the PLA design, by generating PLA alternatives associated with the best trade-offs between different measures (fitness) related to cohesion, coupling and feature modularization. However, the usage of existing search operators changes the PLA organization, and consequently may violate layered rules, impacting negatively in the architecture understanding. In order to solve this problem, this work introduces search operators that consider the layered architectural style rules. Results show that the proposed operators contribute to obtain better solutions, maintaining the adopted style, with better or equivalent fitness values.