Towards automated inconsistency handling in design models

Abstract

The 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. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.