How Can Optimization Models Support the Maintenance of Component-Based Software?

The maintenance phase of software systems is ever more increasing its incidence, in terms of effort, to the whole software lifecycle. Therefore the introduction of automated techniques that can help software maintainers to take decision on the basis of quantitative evaluation would be a suitable phenomenon. Search-based techniques offer today a very promising view on the automation of searching processes in the software engineering domain. Component-based software is a very interesting paradigm to apply such type of techniques, for example for component selection. In this paper we introduce optimization techniques to manage the problem of failures at maintenance time. In particular, we introduce two approaches that provide maintenance actions to be taken in order to overcome system failures in case of monitored and non-monitored software systems.