Towards a Unifying Conceptual Framework for Inconsistency Management Approaches: Definitions and Instantiations

The problem of managing inconsistencies within and between models is omnipresent in software engineering. Over the years many different inconsistency management approaches have been proposed by the research community. Because of their large diversity of backgrounds and the diversity of models being considered, it is difficult to pinpoint what these approaches have in common and what not. As a result, researchers encounter difficulties when positioning and comparing their work with existing state-of-the-art, or when collaborating on or combining different approaches. Also, end-users have a hard time making informed decisions to select the most appropriate approach. To address these problems, we present a unifying conceptual framework of definitions and terminology, independent of any concrete inconsistency management approach or (modelling) language. The contribution is a formal framework providing a common understanding of what (in)consistency means, what inconsistency management involves and what assumptions are commonly made by existing approaches. The formalisation is also illustrated with four instantiations taken from different research fields.