Ant colony optimization for feature selection in software product lines

Software product lines (SPLs) are important software engineering techniques for creating a collection of similar software systems. Software products can be derived from SPLs quickly. The process of software product derivation can be modeled as feature selection optimization with resource constraints, which is a nondeterministic polynomial-time hard (NP-hard) problem. In this paper, we present an approach that using ant colony optimization to get an approximation solution of the problem in polynomial time. We evaluate our approach by comparing it to two important approximation techniques. One is filtered Cartesian flattening and modified heuristic (FCF+M-HEU) algorithm, the other is genetic algorithm for optimized feature selection (GAFES). The experimental results show that our approach performs 6% worse than FCF+M-HEU with reducing much running time. Meanwhile, it performs 10% better than GAFES with taking more time. © 2013 Shanghai Jiaotong University and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.