CONTENTS

KNOWLEDGE ENGINEERING: PRINCIPLES AND TECHNIQUES
Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering,
Principles and Techniques, KEPT2009
Cluj-Napoca (Romania), July 2–4, 2009, pp. 181–184
A MULTIAGENT DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR ASSISTING
SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE AND EVOLUTION
GABRIELA CZIBULA (1) , ISTVAN GERGELY CZIBULA (1) , ADRIANA MIHAELA GURAN (1) ,
AND GRIGORETA SOFIA COJOCAR (1)
Abstract. The development of tools for building performant, open, scalable and
continuously adaptable software systems is a major challenge in software engineering
and artificial intelligence researches. The problems related to the maintenance
and the evolution of software systems are essential, a major requirement
being to develop methodologies for the structural and behavioral optimization of
the systems. In this paper we propose an intelligent multiagent decision support
system for assisting software developers during the maintenance and evolution of
software systems. The proposed system is part of a research project that aims at
developing machine learning techniques for the structural and behavioral adaptation
of software systems during their maintenance and evolution. The current
status of our work is also presented.
1. Introduction
The concept of decision support system (DSS) is very broad, because there are
many approaches to decision-making, and because of the wide range of domains in
which decisions are made. A DSS can take many different forms. In general, we can
say that a DSS is a computerized system that facilitates decision making.
The main objective of our research is to use machine learning techniques [1] for
structural adaptation of software systems during their maintenance and evolution
and for their behavioral self-adaptation, as well. The developed techniques will be
incorporated in an intelligent multiagent decision support system for assisting software
developers in the maintenance and evolution of software systems.
The aim of this paper is to propose an intelligent multiagent decision support
system (DSSEM - Decision Support System for Software Evolution and Maintenance)
for assisting software developers during the maintenance and evolution of software
systems. For the structural adaptation of software systems and for their behavioral
self-adaptation we propose to use machine learning [1] techniques.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the motivation
of our approach. The architecture of DSSEM system is presented in Section 3. Some
conclusions and future research directions are given in Section 4.
2000 Mathematics Subject Classification. 68N99, 68T99, 68T05.
Key words and phrases. software engineering, decision support system, refactoring, machine
learning.
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c○2009 Babe¸s-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca