Towards Multiple Model Synchronization with Comprehensive Systems

Model management is a central activity in Software Engineering. The most challenging aspect of model management is to keep models consistent with each other while they evolve. As a consequence, there has been increasing activity in this area, which has produced a number of approaches to address this synchronization challenge. The majority of these approaches, however, is limited to a binary setting; i.e. the synchronization of exactly two models with each other. A recent Dagstuhl seminar on multidirectional transformations made it clear that there is a need for further investigations in the domain of general multiple model synchronization simply because not every multiary consistency relation can be factored into binary ones. However, with the help of an auxiliary artifact, which provides a global view over all models, multiary synchronization can be achieved by existing binary model synchronization means. In this paper, we propose a novel comprehensive system construction to produce such an artifact using the same underlying base modelling language as the one used to define the models. Our approach is based on the definition of partial commonalities among a set of aligned models. Comprehensive systems can be shown to generalize the underlying categories of graph diagrams and triple graph grammars and can efficiently be implemented in existing tools.