Applying the Genetic Algorithm Concept for Determining the Inheritance Relationship between Objects in Object Oriented Languages

The object-oriented programming model is based on the concept of objects where data is linked to their operations within a specific classification named as a class. The class is usually used to describe a number of specific programming objects. The most important characteristic of object-oriented programming languages is the inheritance property, which is the ability to build a new class of objects on the basis of an old one that was created previously. The new class inherits all the attributes (data) and behavior (methods) of the old one without the need to reformulate or list them. This process reduces the amount of redundant data and minimizes the size of the code. However, the process of determining the common characteristics of a group of objects is often done in a traditional sequential and repetitive manner during the analysis stage of collecting and sorting different system data. Unfortunately, it's full costs of time and effort. This paper presents a proposed algorithm based on the concept of the genetic algorithm to automatically determine the inheritance relationship between the largest possible numbers of objects and thus obtaining an abstract class from which the rest of the relevant classes can inherit. The proposed algorithm can also contribute to facilitate the design of a database which consists of large data set and their link to each other.