Nature inspired system analysis

The process of cloning variants of a system to accommodate increasing customization is often state of the practice where code duplication is caused by the combination of maintenance problems, high customization, and time pressure. This particular situation motivates the research on similarity analysis of system variants. Similarity determination, variability information recovery, and evolution history reconstruction are prime goals in this context. Analogous research problems appear in the bioinformatics. The growing amount of DNA/RNA sequence data requires efficient similarity analysis and proper visualizations. This branch of computer science faces the tasks of simultaneous aligning for multiple genome sequences, and estimating evolutionary correlations in a given set of taxa. Hence, we applied these techniques to analyze a group of related systems from the BSD Unix family as prove of concept towards model-based variant analysis of complex systems.