Athena: A Visual Tool to Support the Development of Computational Intelligence Systems Pedro Oliveira * , Matheus Souza * , Ronyerison Braga * , Ricardo Britto † , Ricardo Lira Rabˆ elo * and Pedro Santos Neto * * Software Engineering and Industrial Informatics Lab Department of Computer Science Universidade Federal do Piau´ ı Teresina - PI - Brazil E-mail: {petrus.cc, matheusmmcs, ronyerisonbraga}@gmail.com, {ricardoalr, pasn}@ufpi.edu.br † Department of Software Engineering Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden E-mail: ricardo.britto@bth.se Abstract—Computational Intelligence (CI) embraces tech- niques designed to address complex real-world problems in which traditional approaches are ineffective or infeasible. Some of these techniques are being used to solve several complex problems, such as the team allocation, building products portfolios in a software product line and test case selection/prioritization. However, de- spite the usefulness of these applications, the development of solutions based in CI techniques is not a trivial activity, since it involves the implementation/adaptation of algorithms to specific context and problems. This work presents Athena, a visual tool developed aiming at offering a simple approach to develop CI- based software systems. In order to do this, we proposed a drag- and-drop approach, which we called CI as a Service (CIaaS). Based on a preliminary study, we can state that Athena can help researchers to save time during the development of computational intelligence approaches. Index Terms—Computational Intelligence, Artificial Intelli- gence, Visual Programming, Tool, Service I. I NTRODUCTION The Computational Intelligence (CI) embraces several tech- niques designed to address complex problems that are not well solved by traditional techniques [1], e.g. Linear Programming [2], Quadratic Programming [3], or Geometric Programming [4]. These techniques represent an emerging computing paradigm that draw their metaphorical inspiration from diverse natural sources, e.g. human behavior, ants behavior, physics law, and others [5]. Compared with the traditional optimization schemes, the nature-inspired techniques are more suitable candidates for dealing with the demanding problems faced by industry, and can thus offer us robust and competitive solutions [6]. These algorithms have been successful in solving complex problems, such as data mining, least cost routing in telecom- munications industry, spam prevention, circuit design, team allocation [7], test cases selection/prioritization [8], financial applications, building products portfolios in a software product line [9], and so on. However, despite the usefulness of CI techniques, there are few tools and code libraries that facilitate the handling of CI techniques to solve a specific problem. According with the study presented by Parejo et al. [10], the number of tools is even lower when it goes for situations in which there is a need for combining more then one CI technique. Furthermore, few tools have a visual environment which allows the modeling of computer systems, a factor that facilitate the use of CI techniques [11]. In general, when a researcher needs to use CI techniques, it is necessary to implement it, and adapt it to the specific problem. As the development of reusable applications is not a simple problem, most of algorithms used in a project are discarded after its execution, since a dependency to the target problem is created. In order to fill the above discussed gaps, we propose in this work a visual, customizable, real-time, web-based tool, called Athena. Athena facilitates the construction of computational intelligence systems, inspired in the metaphor of digital cir- cuits constructions [12] and in the Vision Blocks innovative tool [13]. One goal of the Athena project is to offer a simple way to develop CI systems, by dragging and dropping components in a visual environment, creating a new concept, that we called Computational Intelligence as a Service (CIaaS). Besides, Athena runs in well-known cloud computing platforms [14], enabling the elasticity that is defined as the degree to which a system is able to adapt to workload changes by provisioning and deprovisioning resources in an autonomic manner. Thus, Athena will allow the execution of CI systems in a suitable