An Ant Colony Optimization Approach to the Software Release Planning with Dependent Requirements

Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has been successfully employed to tackle a variety of hard combinatorial optimization problems, including the traveling salesman problem, vehicle routing, sequential ordering and timetabling. ACO, as a swarm intelligence framework, mimics the indirect communication strategy employed by real ants mediated by pheromone trails. Among the several algorithms following the ACO general framework, the Ant Colony System (ACS) has obtained convincing results in a range of problems. In Software Engineering, the effective application of ACO has been very narrow, being restricted to a few sparse problems. This paper expands this applicability, by adapting the ACS algorithm to solve the well-known Software Release Planning problem in the presence of dependent requirements. The evaluation of the proposed approach is performed over 72 synthetic datasets and considered, besides ACO, the Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing. Results are consistent to show the ability of the proposed ACO algorithm to generate more accurate solutions to the Software Release Planning problem when compared to Genetic Algorithm and Simulated Annealing.