Technology Support for Collaborative Inconsistency Management in Model Driven Engineering

Model driven engineering is one answer to increasing demands on software development and maintenance. Today´s software systems are often large, complex but also safety-critical and should be highly adaptable in life cycle. The efficient development of large and complex software systems needs a high degree of collaboration in the design and specification phases. Well-defined, (graphical) modeling languages provide therefore a matter of communication for software engineers. Further the distribution of development locations and the concurrency of work are typical in global software engineering projects. This kind of collaborative modeling needs reliable integration mechanisms for co-evolved models. However the syntactic and semantic correct (consistent) integration of concurrent evolved models is not satisfactorily supported by current tools. Especially the inconsistency resolution for merged architecture and design models is a communication-intensive, collaborative task. This paper proposes a technology support of automatic inconsistency analysis and visualization for distributed modelers whose synchronize their parallel work.