Co-evolving Pattern Synthesis and Class Responsibility Assignment in Architectural Synthesis

Architectural synthesis (AS) activity plays a key role in architecture design as it essentially links the problem to the solution space. To reuse successful design experience, architects may use architectural patterns in AS to generate candidate solutions. In a pattern-based AS, there are two challenges: one is class responsibility assignment (CRA) when using specific patterns and the other is pattern synthesis which attempts to avoid the pattern constraint violations. In this paper, we propose a cooperative coevolution approach to assign class responsibility and synthesize pattern automatically in a pattern-based AS. We formally translate the problem of the automated pattern-based AS into a multi-objective optimization problem, and describe the approach in detail. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.