Integration tools for consistency management between design documents in development processes

Abstract

Development processes in engineering disciplines are inherently complex. Throughout the development process, the system to be built is modeled from different perspectives and on different levels of abstraction in multiple documents. They are related by manifold dependencies and need to be maintained mutually consistent with respect to these dependencies. In addition, development processes are highly incremental and iterative. Thus, tools are urgently needed which assist developers in maintaining consistency between inter-dependent documents. These tools have to operate incrementally and need to support user interactions, as the effects of changes cannot always be determined automatically and deterministically. At the Department of Computer Science 3 at RWTH Aachen University, triple graph grammars (TGG) have been invented as a formal approach to handling integration problems. During multiple research activities at the department and many other research groups, TGGs have been used as a basis to design algorithms and modeling formalisms and have been further elaborated. At the department they were implemented and enhanced in different ways for the support of rapid integration tool construction for real-world interactive development processes. This paper gives an insight into specification, algorithms, and tool construction for interactive, incremental integration and shows the application within the design process of a chemical plant executed in a commercial product. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.