Meta-Heuristics for Solving the Software Component Allocation Problem

Abstract

The software component allocation problem is concerned with mapping a set of software components to the computational units available in a heterogeneous computing system while maximizing a certain objective function. This problem is important in the domain of component-based software engineering, and solving it is not a trivial task. In this paper, we demonstrate a software framework for defining and solving component allocation problem instances. In addition, we implement two meta-heuristics for solving the problem. The experiments show that these meta-heuristics achieve good performance. The framework is designed to be extensible and therefore other researchers can conveniently use it to implement new meta-heuristics for solving the software component allocation problem.

Keywords

• Component allocation
• model-driven engineering
• embedded systems
• heterogeneous systems
• genetic algorithms
• ant colony optimization