CoMPers: A configurable conflict management framework for personalized collaborative modeling

Abstract

Context:

Modeling is an activity in the software development life cycle where experts and stakeholders collaborate as a team. In collaborative modeling, adhering to the optimistic versioning paradigm allows users to make concurrent changes to the same model, but conflicts may arise. To achieve an integrated and consistent merged model, conflicts must be resolved.

Objective:

The primary objective of this study was to provide a customizable and extensible framework for conflict management in personalized change propagation during collaborative modeling.

Methods:

We propose CoMPers, a customizable and extensible conflict management framework designed to address various conflicts encountered in collaborative modeling. We present the duel algorithm for automatically detecting and resolving conflicts according to user preferences. The framework utilizes personalized change propagation to customize collaboration and supports the conflict management process by executing the duel algorithm based on user preferences. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented the CoMPers framework and extended the EMF.cloud modeling framework to demonstrate its applicability.

Results:

We have constructed a proof-of-concept implementation and conducted a real-world case study, a benchmark experiment, and a user experience evaluation. Our findings demonstrate that: (1) CoMPers enables collaborators to configure propagation strategies according to their habits; (2) CoMPers successfully identifies all anticipated conflicts and achieves a 100% accuracy in conflict handling; (3) The majority of participants agreed that CoMPers is user-friendly for collaborative modeling.

Conclusion:

This paper presents the CoMPers framework, which is based on personalized change propagation, and helps collaborators customize conflict management activities. The results confirm the feasibility and advantages of consistent and concurrent modeling within the collaborative CoMPers platform, with an acceptable functionality for approximately ten collaborators.