Abstract
In this paper, we present a search-based automatic many-to-one component substitution mechanism. When a component is removed from an assembly to overcome component obsolescence, failure or unavailability, most existing systems perform component-to-component (one-to-one) substitution. Thus, they only handle situations where a specific candidate component is available. As this is not the most frequent case, it would be more flexible to allow a single component to be replaced by a whole component assembly (many-to-one component substitution). We propose such an automatic substitution mechanism, which does not require the possible changes to be anticipated and which preserves the quality of the assembly. This mechanism requires components to be enhanced with ports, which provide synthetic information on components' assembling capabilities. Such port-enhanced components then constitute input data for a search-based mechanism that looks for possible assemblies using various heuristics to tame complexity.