Stressing Search with Scenarios for Flexible Solutions to Real-Time Task Allocation Problems

One of the most important properties of a good software engineering process and of the design of the software it produces is robustness to changing requirements. Scenario-based analysis is a popular method for improving the flexibility of software architectures. This paper demonstrates a search-based technique for automating scenario-based analysis in the software architecture deployment view. Specifically, a novel parallel simulated annealing search algorithm is applied to the real-time task allocation problem to find baseline solutions which require a minimal number of changes in order to meet the requirements of potential upgrade scenarios. Another simulated annealing-based search is used for finding a solution that is similar to an existing baseline when new requirements arise. Solutions generated using a variety of scenarios are judged by how well they respond to different system requirements changes. The evaluation is performed on a set of problems with a controlled set of different characteristics.