Let the ants deploy your software - An ACO based deployment optimisation strategy

Decisions regarding the mapping of software components to hardware nodes affect the quality of the resulting system. Making these decisions is hard when considering the ever- growing complexity of the search space, as well as conflicting objectives and constraints. An automation of the solution space exploration would help not only to make better decisions but also to reduce the time of this process. In this paper, we propose to employ Ant Colony Optmisation (ACO) as a multi-objective optimisation strategy. The constructive approach is compared to an iterative optimisation procedure - a Genetic Algorithm (GA) adaptation - and was observed to perform suprisingly similar, although not quite on a par with the GA, when validated based on a series of experiments.