On the effect of local search in the multi-objective evolutionary discovery of software architectures

Software architects devote substantial efforts to find the most fitting architectural description for their system, which should not only specify its structure, but is also required to meet multiple, simultaneous quality criteria. Evolutionary computation has recently demonstrated to provide insightful support during the design phase by automatically deciding how to organise internal software components and how they should interact each other. Observed from a multi-objective perspective, particular care has to be taken in order to reach an appropriate trade-off among design metrics, while providing the software engineer with diverse alternatives to choose among. However, multi-objective evolutionary algorithms may find difficulties to control both aspects and, at the same time, to explore the entire search space in depth. Under these circumstances, local search can be applied to complement the evolution by scrutinising the most promising search directions. This paper proposes two different approaches that take advantage of the benefits of local search within the multi-objective evolutionary discovery of component-based software architectures. A detailed analysis and comparative study provides interesting findings like the importance of assigning a sufficient number of evaluations to the local improvement. The way in which local search explores and compares solutions for acceptance is a relevant aspect to promote diversity during the discovery process as well.