Analogy and complex software modeling

摘要

Research on software reuse has to a large extent focused on lowlevel software components. However, facilitating genuinely efficient reuse of software requires knowledge of a previous situation in which a system behaves in some deep and fundamental sense analogically to the system to be constructed. Achieving this goal can only be done by reuse at the highest level of description, that is, at the analysis level. In this paper we present the ROSA project, where we study how to implement support for reuse of analysis models by analogy. The focus is on how to retrieve analogies, how to map them, and how to transfer knowledge from one problem situation to a new problem situation. We base our presentation on work in cognitive psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and software reuse.