In search-based software engineering (SBSE), the choice of search operators can significantly impact the quality of the obtained solutions and the efficiency of the search. Recent work in the context of combining SBSE with model-driven engineering has investigated the idea of automatically generating smart search operators for the case at hand. While showing improvements, this previous work focused on single-objective optimization, a restriction that prohibits a broader use for many SBSE scenarios. Furthermore, since it did not allow users to customize the generation, it could miss out on useful domain knowledge that may further improve the quality of the generated operators. To address these issues, we propose a customizable framework for generating mutation operators for multi-objective problems. It generates mutation operators in the form of model transformations that can modify solutions represented as instances of the given problem meta-model. To this end, we extend an existing framework to support multi-objective problems as well as customization based on domain knowledge, including the capability to specify manual “baseline” operators that are refined during the operator generation. Our evaluation based on the Next Release Problem shows that the automated generation of mutation operators and user-provided domain knowledge can improve the performance of the search without sacrificing the overall result quality.

Sharing research artifacts is known to help people to build upon existing knowledge, adopt novel contributions in practice, and increase the chances of papers receiving attention. In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), openly providing research artifacts plays a key role, even more so as the community targets a broader use of AI techniques, which can only become feasible if large open datasets and confidence measures for their quality are available. However, the current lack of common discipline-specific guidelines for research data sharing opens the opportunity for misunderstandings about the true potential of research artifacts and subjective expectations regarding artifact quality. To address this issue, we introduce a set of guidelines for artifact sharing specifically tailored to MDE research. To design this guidelines set, we systematically analyzed general-purpose artifact sharing practices of major computer science venues and tailored them to the MDE domain. Subsequently, we conducted an online survey with 90 researchers and practitioners with expertise in MDE. We investigated our participants’ experiences in developing and sharing artifacts in MDE research and the challenges encountered while doing so. We then asked them to prioritize each of our guidelines as essential, desirable, or unnecessary. Finally, we asked them to evaluate our guidelines with respect to clarity, completeness, and relevance. In each of these dimensions, our guidelines were assessed positively by more than 92% of the participants. To foster the reproducibility and reusability of our results, we make the full set of generated artifacts available in an open repository at https://mdeartifacts.github.io/.