Current software engineering topics such as clone detection and service selection need to improve the capability of detection process and selection process. The clone detection is the process of finding duplicated code through the system for several purposes such as removal of repeated portions as maintenance part of legacy system. Service selection is the process of finding the appropriate web service which meets the consumer’s request. Both problems can be converted into a matching problem. Matching process forms an essential part of software engineering activities. In this research, a well-known mathematical algorithm Stable Marriage Problem (SMP) and its variations are investigated to fulfil the purposes of matching processes in software engineering area. We aim to provide a competitive matching algorithm that can help to detect cloned software accurately and ensure high scalability, precision and recall. We also aim to apply matching algorithm on incoming request and service profile to deal with the web service as a clever independent object so that we can allow the services to accept or decline requests (equal opportunity) rather than the current state of service selection (search-based), in which service lacks of interacting as an independent candidate. In order to meet the above aims, the traditional SMP algorithm has been extended to achieve the cardinality of many-to-many. This adaptation is achieved by defining the selective strategy which is the main engine of the new adaptations. Two adaptations, Dual-Proposed and Dual-Multi-Allocation, have been proposed to both service selection and clone detection process. The proposed approach (SMP-based) shows very competitive results compare to existing software clone approaches, especially in identifying type 3 (copy with further modifications such update, add and delete statements) of cloned software. It performs the detection process with a relatively high precision and recall compare to the CloneDR tool and shows good scalability on a middle sized program. For service selection, the proposed approach has several advantages such as service protection and service quality. The services gain equal opportunity against the incoming requests. Therefore, the intelligent service interaction is achieved, and both stability and satisfaction of the candidates are ensured. This dissertation contributes to several contributions firstly, the new extended SMP algorithm by introducing selective strategy to accommodate many-to-many matching problems, to improve overall features. Secondly, a new SMP-based clone detection approach to detect cloned software accurately and ensures high precision and recall. Ultimately, a new SMPbased service selection approach allows equal opportunity between services and requests. This led to improve service protection and service quality. Case studies are carried out for experiments with the proposed approach, which show that the new adaptations can be applied effectively to clone detection and service selection processes with several features (e.g. accuracy). It can be concluded that the match based approach is feasible and promising in software engineering domain.

“The Stable marriage problem (SMP) is basically the problem of finding a stable matchingbetween two sets of persons, the men and the women, where each person in every group has a listcontaining every person that belongs to other group ordered by preference. The first ones to discovera stable solution for the problem were D. Gale and G.S. Shapley. Today the problem and most of itsvariations have been studied by many researchers, and for most of them polynomial time algorithmsdo not exist. Lately genetic algorithms have been used to solve such problems and have oftenproduced better solutions than specialized polynomial algorithms. In this thesis we study and showthat the Stable marriage problem has a number of important real-world applications. It theexperimentation, we model the original problem and one of its variations and show the benefits ofusing genetic algorithms for solving the SMP.” / Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik