An Interactive Design Pattern Selection Method

Any inexperienced designer may not take advantage of design patterns due to their high level of abstraction, on the one hand, and their overwhelming number, on the other hand. In this paper, we propose a new approach that first retrieves and recommends a design pattern that is adequate to a designer's modeling context, it then helps them in its instantiation. Our approach learns past pattern reuse cases and it interacts with the designer through a questionnaire to ensure that the retrieved pattern corresponds to their needs and intentions. It uses the text mining technique Principal Component Analysis on past experiences of design pattern reuses; the choice of this technique was based on an experimental evaluation we conducted to determine the most adequate text representation and mining technique for our problem. In a final assistance step, after retrieving the most appropriate design pattern, our approach transforms the design situation at hand into the pattern constituting the solution.