Analogical Reasoning for Reuse of Object-Oriented Specifications

Software reuse means to use again software components built successfully for previous projects. To be successful, techniques for reuse should be incorporated into the development environment. This paper presents an approach where analogical reasoning is used to identify potentially reusable analysis models. A prototype implementation with focus on the repository and analogical reasoning mechanism is presented. All models in the repository are described in terms of their structure. Semantic similarity among models is found by identifying distance in a semantic net built on WordNet, an electronic, lexical database. During retrieval of potential analogies, information about structure and semantics of models is used. During mapping, genetic algorithms are used to optimize the mapping between two models based on their structure and semantics. Experiments are described in which analogies are identified from the models in the repository. The results reported show that this approach is viable.