Nowadays, large-scale industrial software systems may involve hundreds of developers working on hundreds of different but related models representing parts of the same system specification. Detecting and resolving structural inconsistencies between these models is then critical. In this article we propose to represent models by sequences of elementary construction operations, rather than by the set of model elements they contain. Structural and methodological consistency rules can then be expressed uniformly as logical constraints on such sequences. Our approach is meta-model independent, allowing us to deal with consistency between different models whatever their kind. We have validated our approach by building a Prolog engine that detects violations of structural and methodological constraints specified on UML 2.1 models and requirement models. This engine has been integrated into two contemporary UML-based modelling environments, Eclipse EMF and Rational Software Architect (RSA).

Due to the increasing use of models, and the inevitable model inconsistencies that arise during model-based software development and evolution, model inconsistency detection is gaining more and more attention. Inconsistency checkers typically analyze entire models to detect undesired structures as defined by inconsistency rules. The larger the models become, the more time the inconsistency detection process takes. Taking into account model evolution, one can significantly reduce this time by providing an incremental checker. In this article we propose an incremental inconsistency checker based on the idea of representing models as sequences of primitive construction operations. The impact of these operations on the inconsistency rules can be computed to analyze and reduce the number of rules that need to be re-checked during a model increment.

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Abstract. Large-scale industrial systems involve nowadays hundreds of developers working on hundreds of models representing parts of the whole system specification. Unfortunately, few tool support is provided for managing this huge set of models. In such a context of collaborative work, the approach commonly adopted by the industry is to use a central repository and to make use of merge mechanisms and locks.In this article we present a collaborative model editing framework, peer-to-peer oriented, that considers that every developer has his own partial replication of the system specification and that makes use of messages exchange for propagating changes made by developers. Our approach has the advantage not to be based on a single repository, which is more and more the case in large-scale industrial projects.

International audienceThe increasing adoption of MDE (Model Driven Engineering) favored the use of large models of different types. It turns out that when the modeled system gets larger, simply computing a list of inconsistencies (as provided by existing techniques for inconsistency handling) gets less and less effective when it comes to actually fixing them. In fact, the inconsistency handling task (i.e. deciding what needs to be done in order to restore consistency) remains largely manual. This work is a step towards its automatization. We propose a method for the generation of repair plans for an inconsistent model. In our approach, the depth of the explored search space is configurable in order to cope with the underlying combinatorial characteristic of this problem and to avoid overwhelming the designer with large plans that can not be fully checked before being applied