A Group Decision-Making Approach for Global Consistency of Heterogeneous Models

Abstract

The design of complex systems goes through a multi-view paradigm in which separate teams, from different viewpoints, build partial source models describing the system. These source models are called heterogeneous models since they are expressed in different languages. The main objective of this paper is to provide an approach — called CAHM for Collaborative Alignment of Heterogeneous Models — that leverages collaborative engineering and especially group decision-making principles to ensure the overall consistency of heterogeneous source models. This approach defines two sub-processes: a first one to collaboratively match heterogeneous models to develop the inter-model correspondences and a second one ensuring the consistency of the produced model of correspondences in case of model evolution. In this paper, we restate the basis of the CAHM approach, then, we detail the second sub-process that aims at maintaining the coherence of the overall system. This sub-process handles the evolution of source models by managing the impact of these evolutions on the established model of correspondences. It incorporates mechanisms to calculate the impact of changes, as well as mechanisms to formalize the group decision-making, while addressing the inconsistencies that may occur due to changes. CAHM is illustrated and validated on a real example of a hospital emergency department case study.