A flexible operation-based infrastructure for collaborative model-driven engineering

Collaborative model-driven engineering infrastructures are used to concurrently deal with models from diverse engineering domains. However, studies within the industry have shown that existing infrastructures often offer insufficient collaborative support or do not incorporate features to handle multiple engineering domains, which leads to inefficient collaboration and reduced team productivity. In this paper, we propose a flexible operation-based infrastructure for collaborative model-driven engineering that addresses these issues. The infrastructure supports lock-free collaboration within co-existing metamodels of different domains. It also allows engineers to arbitrarily push or pull changes of divergent versions and to deal with appearing conflicts. To achieve those functionalities, the infrastructure relies on operations that represent atomic changes on our simplified version of the Meta-Object Facility, such as creating and deleting new types, instances, or modifying properties. The infrastructure manages those operations within a tree-like structure that grows incrementally. Sequences of operations, going from the root to a leaf, represent different versions of a complete model history (including metamodels). Model versions can be merged by concatenating their corresponding branches and handling occurring conflicts. We evaluated the infrastructure by applying it in practical scenarios in collaboration with an industrial partner. These scenarios demonstrate the feasibility of our infrastructure by complying with our derived requirements for collaborative model-driven engineering infrastructures.