Component Updates as a Boolean Optimization Problem

Component updates always bear the risk of negatively influencing the operativeness of software systems. Due to improper combinations of component versions, dependencies may break. In practise this often turns out to be due to missing or incompatible interfaces and signatures (syntactical interface) but may also be caused by changes in behavior or quality. In this paper we model the problem of finding a well-configured system consisting of multiple component versions as a Boolean Optimization Problem. To achieve this, we introduce objective functions and constraints that lead to most recent, minimal systems and use Branch-and-Bound to restrict the search space.