A Flexible Operation-Based Infrastructure for Collaborative Model-Driven Engineering
Sprache des Titels:
Englisch
Original Buchtitel:
19th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA 2023)
Original Kurzfassung:
Collaborative model-driven engineering infrastructures are used to concurrently deal with models from diverse
engineering domains. However, studies within the industry have shown that existing infrastructures often offer insufficient
collaborative support or do not incorporate features to handle multiple engineering domains, which leads to inefficient collaboration and reduced team productivity. In this paper, we propose a flexible operation-based infrastructure for collaborative
model-driven engineering that addresses these issues. The infrastructure supports lock-free collaboration within co-existing
metamodels of different domains. It also allows engineers to arbitrarily push or pull changes of divergent versions and to deal
with appearing conflicts. To achieve those functionalities, the infrastructure relies on operations that represent atomic changes
on our simplified version of the Meta-Object Facility, such as creating and deleting new types, instances, or modifying properties.
The infrastructure manages those operations within a tree-like structure that grows incrementally. Sequences of operations,
going from the root to a leaf, represent different versions of a complete model history (including metamodels). Model versions
can be merged by concatenating their corresponding branches and handling occurring conflicts. We evaluated the infrastructure
by applying it in practical scenarios in collaboration with an industrial partner. These scenarios demonstrate the feasibility of our
infrastructure by complying with our derived requirements for collaborative model-driven engineering infrastructures.
Forschungs-