A Formalization of Group Decision Making in Multi-Viewpoints Design

Abstract

Complex systems are typically designed collaboratively by stakeholders from different domains. This multi viewpoints
 paradigm promotes the separation of concerns since separate teams, from different business viewpoints, build partial
 models describing the system. These partial models are naturally heterogeneous. So, it is difficult to ensure their intermodel
 consistency if kept separately. For that, we propose a collaborative approach that combines Group Decision Making
 (GDM) and Model-Based Engineering (MBE). This paper highlights the GDM part of our approach and especially the
 concept of decision policy that enables coming up with collective decisions in group decision-making contexts.

A Group Decision-Making Approach for Global Consistency of Heterogeneous Models

“…This process is accomplished thanks to a metamodel called MMCollab (for MetaModel of Collaboration). MMCollab supports the description of collaborative sessions of collective decision elaboration [2], we have described how the group decision-making process is formalized through MMCollab in [3]. In this paper, we focus on the global system consistency when source models evolve: we provide a collaborative process to maintain the consistency by managing changes that may occur and their respective impacts.…”

“…The approach is based on two metamodels: MMCollab [3] and MMC [23]. MMCollab (MetaModel of Collaboration) -described in section 3 -is used to carry out decision-making whether at the level of the collaborative matching phase, or that of consistency management.…”

“…The knowledge of the actors and their choices are used in the two phases to carry out manual definitions and decision-making activities. The tool performs the automatic tasks, namely generation of the model of correspondences, detection of changes and a part of the inconsistencies processing, as we will see in the following (in section 5.2).The approach is based on two metamodels: MMCollab[3] and MMC[23]. MMCollab (MetaModel of Collaboration) -described in section 3 -is used to carry out decision-making whether at the level of the collaborative matching phase, or that of consistency management.…”