Consistency management in modeling: a broad topic. Individual notions of this are rarely the same but depend on the needs of the respective context. What they have in common is that it is about consistency within one or between multiple models. But what does it mean for models to be consistent? And do we only want to document it, validate it, or even enforce it automatically? The everyday experience of many engineers is still that notions of consistency tend to be implicit or at least unformalized. Checking or maintaining it is often a manual task.

In this talk, we will combine views on the topic of consistency management from research and industrial practice: What kinds of consistency and consistency management are of actual interest? How do theoretical concepts relate to approaches applied in practice and which of these approaches work well despite theoretical limitations? And where do we need better concepts and research to address requirements from practice?

We will bring together a research-oriented view of integrated and distributed consistency validation and preservation with practical experience from the PREEvision tool. It is an integrated tool for holistic development of electric/electronic architectures that covers the information needs of many engineers in a single model. However, even such an integrated approach requires internal mechanisms for ensuring consistency of the complex information inside that single model. The consistency management concepts and techniques it implements will give us an impression of how foundational concepts are combined with sufficient pragmatics and what practical benefits have already been achieved. Beyond this state of practice, we will take a look at increasing demands on consistency management in modularized, distributed development, deployment, and update. Finally, based on the resulting challenges, we will highlight where foundational research is needed to ensure the future success of consistency management in practice.

About Heiko Klare:

Heiko works at Vector Informatik GmbH as a principal software engineer for PREEvision, a model-based tool for holistic design of electric/electronic architectures. He is responsible for developing the Eclipse IDE and Eclipse RCP Platform, which is the base technology for the PREEvision tool, in terms of open-source contributions to that project. He is an Eclipse committer to the Eclipse platform project, coordinator of the cross-company “Initiative 31”, an effort to modernize the UI technology of the Eclipse platform, and chair of the Eclipse Planning Council. Before his work at Vector Informatik, Heiko worked as a researcher and postdoctoral researcher for software engineering with a focus on model-driven software development at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In his PhD thesis, he researched how engineers can preserve the consistency of multiple models they use to describe the specific parts of a system according to their individual roles by combining model transformations to transformation networks.

Heiko works at Vector Informatik GmbH as a principal software engineer for PREEvision, a model-based tool for holistic design of electric/electronic architectures. He is responsible for developing the Eclipse IDE and Eclipse RCP Platform, which is the base technology for the PREEvision tool, in terms of open-source contributions to that project. He is Eclipse committer to the Eclipse platform project, coordinator of the cross-company “Initiative 31”, an effort to modernize the UI technology of the Eclipse platform, and chair of the Eclipse Planning Council.

Before his work at Vector Informatik, Heiko worked as a researcher and postdoctoral researcher for software engineering with a focus on model-driven software development at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). In his PhD thesis, he researched how engineers can preserve the consistency of multiple models they use to describe the specific parts of a system according to their individual roles by combining model transformations to transformation networks.