Treffer: Genetic programming meets model-driven development. Research Paper 2007

Genetic programming is known to provide good solu-tions for many problems like the evolution of network pro-tocols and distributed algorithms. In such cases it is most likely a hardwired module of a design framework that as-sists the engineer to optimize specific aspects of the sys-tem to be developed. It provides its results in a fixed for-mat through an internal interface. In this paper we show how the utility of genetic programming can be increased re-markably by isolating it as a component and integrating it into the model-driven software development process. Our genetic programming framework produces XMI-encoded UML models that can easily be loaded into widely available modeling tools which in turn posses code generation as well as additional analysis and test capabilities. We use the evo-lution of a distributed election algorithm as an example to illustrate how genetic programming can be combined with model-driven development. This example clearly illustrates the advantages of our approach – the generation of source code in different programming languages. 1