Received: 31 March 2018 Revised: 17 August 2018 Accepted: 23 September 2018 DOI: 10.1111/coin.12193 ORIGINAL ARTICLE MaDHS: Many-objective discrete harmony search to improve existing package design Amarjeet Prajapati 1 Jitender Kumar Chhabra 2 1 Department of Computer Science and IT, JIIT, Noida, India 2 Department of Computer Engineering, NIT, Kurukshetra, India Correspondence Amarjeet Prajapati, Department of Computer Science and IT, JIIT, Noida-201 309, India. Email: amarjeetnitkkr@gmail.com Abstract Recently, many computational intelligence algorithms have been proposed to address software remodulariza- tion problem. Unfortunately, it has been observed that the performance of optimizers degrades with the opti- mization problem containing more than three objectives. In this paper, we propose a many-objective discrete har- mony search (MaDHS) to address the software remodu- larization problem having more than three objectives. The basic idea of MaDHS is that it uses the quality indicator I ε + and external archive to rank and store the nondomi- nated solutions. Along with MaDHS, five remodularization objectives, ie, low coupling, high cohesion, low modifica- tion degree, quality of class distribution, and low package instability have also been adapted to improve the pack- age structure of existing object-oriented software systems. To improve the accuracy of modularization solution, the coupling and cohesion objectives are formulated in terms of various dimensions of direct coupling relationships. To test the supremacy of the proposed approach, it is eval- uated over eight real-world object-oriented software sys- tems. Simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms the other existing approaches in terms of cou- plings, cohesion, modularization quality, modularization merit factor, rate per refactoring of achieved improvement, and external developers view. KEYWORDS harmony search, multiobjective optimization, package reorganization, software remodularization Computational Intelligence. 2018;1–26. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/coin © 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1