Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/3399
Title: Evolving transformation sequences using genetic algorithms
Authors: Fatiregun, D
Harman, M
Hierons, RM
Issue Date: 2004
Publisher: IEEE
Citation: 4th IEEE Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM 2004), Chicago, pp. 65-74, Sep 2004
Abstract: Program transformation is useful in a number of applications including program comprehension, reverse engineering and compiler optimization. In all these applications, transformation algorithms are constructed by hand for each different transformation goal. Loosely speaking, a transformation algorithm defines a sequence of transformation steps to apply to a given program. It is notoriously hard to find good transformation sequences automatically, and so much (costly) human intervention is required. This work shows how search-based meta-heuristic algorithms can be used to automate, or partly automate the problem of finding good transformation sequences. In this case, the goal of transformation is to reduce program size, but the approach is sufficiently general that it can be used to optimize any source-code level metric. The search techniques used are random search (RS), hill climbing (HC) and genetic algorithms (GA). The paper reports the result of initial experiments on small synthetic program transformation problems. The results are encouraging. They indicate that the genetic algorithm performs significantly better than either hill climbing or random search.
URI: http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/3399
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/SCAM.2004.11
Appears in Collections:Computer Science
Dept of Computer Science Research Papers
Software Engineering (B-SERC)

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