Reactive links across multi-domain engineering models
Cosmina Cristina Raţiu, Wesley K. G. Assunção, Rainer Haas, Alexander Egyed
Abstract
As the engineering world moves towards collaborative model-driven development, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep all model artifacts synchronized and consistent across a myriad of tools and domains. The existing literature proposes a variety of solutions, from passive trace links to computing change propagation paths. However, these solutions require manual propagation and the use of a limited set of tools, while also lacking the efficiency and granularity required during the development of complex systems. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a solution based on reactive propagation links between property values across multi-domain models managed in different tools. As opposed to the traditional passive links, the propagation links automatically react to changes during engineering to assure the synchronization and consistency of the models. The feasibility and performance of our solution were evaluated in two practical scenarios. We identified a set of change propagation cases, all of which could be resolved using our solution, while also rendering a great improvement in terms of efficiency as compared to manual propagation. The contribution of our solution to the state of the practice is to enhance the engineering process by reducing the burden of manually keeping models synchronized, eliminating inconsistencies that can be originated in artifacts managed in a variety of tool from different domains.