Conflict Analysis at Collaborative Development of Domain Specific Models using Description Logics

Today the distribution of development locations, the co-evolution of models and the concurrency of work are typical for collaborative modeling in software projects. Software engineering teams demand modeling techniques at several abstraction levels to manage the complexity of software descriptions. Besides, software models are applied more and more for the specification of safety-critical systems. Hence software models take a hybrid role - as a matter of team communication and precise specification for refinement. Both aspects are considered in the research area of Model Driven Engineering (MDE). It provides methods to deal with formal specified meta-models of graphical (intuitive) modeling languages. Unfortunately the syntactical a semantically correct (consistent) integration of concurrently evolved models is poorly considered by the most MDE approaches. Especially the detection and analyzing of model merge conflicts can be automatized by using logical inference techniques. Therefore this paper proposes an approach based on description logics.