Comprehensive Systems: A formal foundation for Multi-Model Consistency Management

Abstract

Model management is a central activity in Software Engineering. The most challenging aspect of model management is to keep inter-related models consistent with each other while they evolve. As a consequence, there is a lot of scientific activity in this area, which has produced an extensive body of knowledge, methods, results and tools. The majority of these approaches, however, are limited to binary inter-model relations; i.e. the synchronisation of exactly two models. Yet, not every multi-ary relation can be factored into a family of binary relations. In this paper, we propose and investigate a novel comprehensive system construction, which is able to represent multi-ary relations among multiple models in an integrated manner and thus serves as a formal foundation for artefacts used in consistency management activities involving multiple models. The construction is based on the definition of partial commonalities among a set of models using the same language, which is used to denote the (local) models. The main theoretical results of this paper are proofs of the facts that comprehensive systems are an admissible environment for (i) applying formal means of consistency verification (diagrammatic predicate framework), (ii) performing algebraic graph transformation (weak adhesive HLR category), and (iii) that they generalise the underlying setting of graph diagrams and triple graph grammars.

Conflict management techniques for model merging: a systematic mapping review

“…Thereby, an important direction for future research is to generalize local checking of constraints imposed on multimodels for the global constraints that regulate the interaction of the multimodel components in a size-controllable way. But the results of our review show that only two approaches (i. e., A66 [146] and A57 [134]) proposed an initial solution, which has not been implemented yet and lacks practical evidence.…”

“…However, there is not much support for building such a system. Moreover, the main limitation of A57 [134] is lack of the required translators or adapters to integrate the proposed comprehensive systems with heterogeneous modeling tools.…”

The Influence of the Nonfunctional Requirements on the Data Model

“…From a data modeling perspective there are articles about the effect of the different storage formats that have been studied [7] or about different binary serialization formats [8]. There are also studies focusing on single system persistence issues [9] but the impact of the standards and the technical environment has not been studied.…”

A software engineering perspective on digital twin: many candidates, none elected.

“…The challenge is to build a unified model (the digital twin) from heterogeneous ones (its facets). Multi-model consistency management is still an open problem (see [16] for instance).…”