A mixed integer linear programming model for reliability optimisation in the component deployment problem
针对软件组件部署中硬件资源有限、通信网络受限的可靠性优化问题，提出混合整数线性规划模型，实验表明该求解器在寻找可行解或证明无解方面优于现有启发式方法。
Component deployment is a combinatorial optimisation problem in software engineering that aims at finding the best allocation of software components to hardware resources in order to optimise quality attributes, such as reliability. The problem is often constrained because of the limited hardware resources, and the communication network, which may connect only certain resources. Owing to the non-linear nature of the reliability function, current optimisation methods have focused mainly on heuristic or metaheuristic algorithms. These are approximate methods, which find near-optimal solutions in a reasonable amount of time. In this paper, we present a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation of the component deployment problem. We design a set of experiments where we compare the MILP solver to methods previously used to solve this problem. Results show that the MILP solver is efficient in finding feasible solutions even where other methods fail, or prove infeasibility where feasible solutions do not exist.