New Strategies to Resolve Inconsistencies between Models of Decoupled Tools

Maintaining consistency between models in development processes is a challenging task. Though in software engineering many case tools exist which allow the editing of models and include code generators for reverse or round trip engineering, the source code is edited with specialized development environments. The same holds for other models, such as requirements specications or architectures. The editing tools are often decoupled from each other. Additionally, modications of the models are performed simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce strategies to resolve inconsistencies by so-called repair actions. The novelty of the strategies is that they specify dierent concurrent ways of coming to a consistent state, not knowing anything about the modications a user had applied. Concrete repair actions are derived at runtime based on the consistency rules and the inconsistent parts of the models only. The maintenance tool can maintain additional models’ consistency without developing specialized repair actions. One new strategy proposed in this paper in contrast to other approaches is to heal the violated consistency rule or try a similar one.