Agent-based support for interactive search in conceptual software design

Simons, Chris; Parmee, Ian

Abstract

While recent attempts to search a conceptual software engineering design search space with multi-objective evolutionary algorithms have yielded promising results, the practical application of such search-based techniques remains to be addressed. This paper reports initial findings of the application of software agents in
support of an interactive, user-centered conceptual software
design scenario. The supporting role of a number of single
responsibility agents is described and results for a case study indicate that the application of such agents to search-based design scenarios provides efficient, high performance and effective support. The notion of interactive, joint human-computer activity appears to map well to conceptual software design scenarios: focus on superior design concepts and thence to useful and
interesting designs provides a natural and effective way of
narrowing the population based search. In addition, agents and the human designer appear to interact as cooperative “team players”, jointly influencing the evolutionary algorithm based search. Nevertheless, challenges remain, including expanding the scale of
implementation of underlying technologies to support distributed, collaborative design.

Citation

Simons, C., & Parmee, I. (2008, July). Agent-based support for interactive search in conceptual software design. Poster presented at 10th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO' 08), Atlanta, Georgia, USA

• Presentation Conference Type: Poster
• Conference Name: 10th Annual Conference on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GECCO' 08)
• Conference Location: Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Start Date: Jul 12, 2008
• End Date: Jul 14, 2008
• Publication Date: Jul 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Jan 10, 2011
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 19, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 1785-1786
• Keywords: software agents, software design, evolutionary search
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1011515