A parallel portfolio approach to configuration optimization for large software product lines. (14th June 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Shi, Kai; Yu, Huiqun; Guo, Jianmei; Fan, Guisheng; Yang, Xingguang
• Is Part Of: Software, practice & experience. Volume 48:Number 9(2018)
• Page Start: 1588
• Page End: 1606
• Publication Date: 2018-06-14
• Subjects: constraint solving -- multiobjective evolutionary algorithms -- parallel portfolio -- search‐based software engineering -- software product lines; Computer software -- Periodicals; Computer programming -- Periodicals; Computer programs -- Periodicals; 005.3
• DOI: 10.1002/spe.2594
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0038-0644

Abstract

Summary: Software product line (SPL) engineering demands for optimal or near‐optimal products that balance multiple often competing and conflicting objectives. A major challenge for large SPLs is to efficiently explore a huge space of various products and satisfy a large number of predefined constraints simultaneously. To improve the optimality and convergence speed, we propose a parallel portfolio approach, called IBEAPORT, which designs three algorithm variants by incorporating constraint solving into the indicator‐based evolutionary algorithm in different ways and performs these variants by utilizing parallelization techniques. Our approach utilizes the exploration capabilities of different algorithms and improves optimality as far as possible within a limited time budget. We evaluate our approach on five large‐scale real‐world SPLs. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art for all five SPLs on a quality indicator and a diversity indicator. Moreover, IBEAPORT quickly converges to a relatively stable hypervolume value even for the largest SPL with 6888 features.