Software deployment misconfiguration often happens and has been one of the major causes of deployment failures that give rise to service interruptions. However, there is currently no existing approach to automatically repairing deployment failures. We propose DeployFix, which automatically repairs software deployment failures via constraint solving in the dynamic-changing deployment environments. DeployFix first defines DeployIR as a unified intermediate representation to achieve the translation of heterogeneous specifications from different schedulers with different syntaxes. By reducing the root-cause analysis of deployment failures to the conflict resolution in propositional logic, DeployFix uses off-the-shelf constraint solvers to achieve automatic localization and diagnosis of conflicting constraints, which are the root causes of deployment failures. DeployFix finally resolves the conflicting constraints and generates repaired deployment configurations in terms of practical requirements. We evaluate DeployFix in both simulation and production environments with tens of thousands of nodes at Alibaba, on which tens of thousands of applications are running guided by hundreds of thousands of deployment constraints. Experimental results demonstrate that DeployFix outperforms the state of the art and it correctly repairs the deployment failures in minutes, even in a large production data center.

An effective method for addressing the configuration optimization problem (COP) in Software Product Lines (SPLs) is to deploy a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, for example, the state-of-the-art SATIBEA. In this paper, an improved hybrid algorithm, called SATIBEA-LSSF, is proposed to further improve the algorithm performance of SATIBEA, which is composed of a multi-children generating strategy, an enhanced mutation strategy with local searching and an elite inheritance mechanism. Empirical results on the same case studies demonstrate that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for four out of five SPLs on a quality Hypervolume indicator and the convergence speed. To verify the effectiveness and robustness of our algorithm, the parameter sensitivity analysis is discussed and three observations are reported in detail.

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) has been widely applied to software product lines (SPLs) for addressing the configuration optimization problems. For example, the state-of-the-art SMTIBEA algorithm extends the constraint expressiveness and supports richer constraints to better address these problems. However, it just works better than the competitor for four out of five SPLs in five objectives and the convergence speed is not significantly increased for largest Linux SPL from 5 to 30[Formula: see text]min. To further improve the optimization efficiency, we propose a parallel framework SMTPORT, which combines four corresponding SMTIBEA variants and performs these variants by utilizing parallelization techniques within the limited time budget. For case studies in LVAT repository, we conduct a series of experiments on seven real-world and highly-constrained SPLs. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for all the seven SPLs in terms of a quality Hypervolume metric and a diversity Pareto Front Size indicator.

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) with the constraint solving has been successfully applied to address the configuration optimization problem in software product line (SPL), for example, the state-of-the-art SATIBEA algorithm. However, each different MOEA with special search operator demonstrates the different strength and weakness in terms of optimality and convergence speed. The SATIBEA just combines the SAT (Boolean satisfiability problem) constraint solving with the Indicator-Based Evolutionary Algorithm (IBEA) for evaluating the algorithm performance. In this paper, we propose six hybrid algorithms which combine the SAT solving with different MOEAs. Case study is based on five large-scale, rich-constrained and real-world SPLs. Empirical results demonstrate that SATMOCell algorithm obtains a competitive optimization performance to the state-of-the-art that outperforms the SATIBEA in terms of quality Hypervolume metric for 2 out of 5 SPLs within the same time budget. Moreover, the convergence speed of SATMOCell and SATssNSGA2 is comparable after 10min terminal times. Particularly, the Hypervolume value of SATssNSGA2 reports the average improvement of 1.33% after 20min terminal times.

Multi-objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) have been successfully applied for software product lines (SPLs) to search for optimal or near-optimal solutions that balance multiple objectives. However, MOEAs usually produce invalid solutions that violate the constraints predefined. As invalid solutions are unbuildable in practice, we debate the preservation of invalid solutions during the search. We conduct experiments on seven real-world SPLs, including five largest SPLs hitherto reported and two SPLs with realistic values and constraints of quality attributes. We identify three potential limitations of preserving invalid solutions. Furthermore, based on the state-of-the-art, we design five algorithm variants that adopt different evolutionary operators. By performance evaluation, we provide empirical guidance on how to preserve valid solutions. Our empirical study demonstrates that whether or not to preserve invalid solutions deserves more attention in the community, and in some cases, we have to preserve valid solutions all along the way.

Summary Software product line (SPL) engineering demands for optimal or near‐optimal products that balance multiple often competing and conflicting objectives. A major challenge for large SPLs is to efficiently explore a huge space of various products and satisfy a large number of predefined constraints simultaneously. To improve the optimality and convergence speed, we propose a parallel portfolio approach, called IBEAPORT, which designs three algorithm variants by incorporating constraint solving into the indicator‐based evolutionary algorithm in different ways and performs these variants by utilizing parallelization techniques. Our approach utilizes the exploration capabilities of different algorithms and improves optimality as far as possible within a limited time budget. We evaluate our approach on five large‐scale real‐world SPLs. Empirical results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state of the art for all five SPLs on a quality indicator and a diversity indicator. Moreover, IBEAPORT quickly converges to a relatively stable hypervolume value even for the largest SPL with 6888 features.

Virtual machine consolidation (VMC) is an important issue in cloud computing, which can be used to reduce power consumption and achieve reasonable resource allocation.In this paper, an IMBBO algorithm is proposed to solve the multi-objective optimization problem of VMC through improving the classical Biogeography-Based Optimization (BBO).An improved Cosine migration model and an improved mutation model are presented to increase the efficiency of achieving the optimal solution.Meanwhile, three optimization objectives for server power consumption, load balancing and migration resource overhead are mainly addressed.Finally, several experiments are done to evaluate the performance of IMBBO by comparing with Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) based on the synthetic and real VM running data.The results show that the IMBBO optimizes VM consolidation with higher efficiency.