Locating dependence structures using search-based slicing

This paper introduces an approach to locating dependence structures in a program by searching the space of the powerset of the set of all possible program slices. The paper formulates this problem as a search based software engineering problem. To evaluate the approach, the paper introduces an instance of a search based slicing problem concerned with locating sets of slices that decompose a program into a set of covering slices that minimize inter-slice overlap. The paper reports the result of an empirical study of algorithm performance and result-similarity for hill climbing, genetic, random search and greedy algorithms applied to a set of 12 C programs.