Efficient approach for restructuring multiple inheritance hierarchies

This paper discusses the restructuring of inheritance hierarchies of classes and introduces a method of restructuring multiple hierarchies of class inheritance, which removes duplicated methods and creates inheritance hierarchies without overridden methods while preserving the behavior of objects. This paper formulates a restructuring problem for 0–1 integer programming and presents a network-based solution method, which uses a distance parameter between every pair of characteristics for similarity metric. This paper presents basic theorems for clustering characteristics and defining of inheritance hierarchy. We create inheritance hierarchies based on the rules for a definition of class relationship. The method is analyzed and compared with the existing method. 2006 Published by Elsevier Inc.