A Tool for Collaborative Consistency Checking During Modeling

Consistency checking is widely used to detect inconsistencies in engineering artifacts. In collaborative modeling environments, however, maintaining model consistency is challenging due to the frequent changes introduced by multiple engineers, leading to possibly numerous inconsistencies. These inconsistencies need to be identified and shared among engineers to collaboratively resolve them and prevent cascading problems. Despite extensive research in consistency checking, there remains a lack of tools that support collaborative consistency checking (C3). C3 is defined as the process of checking and fixing inconsistencies during collaborative modeling, whether engineers work synchronously or asynchronously. To address this gap, we introduce a prototype tool integrated into the DesignSpace environment which allows collaborative work during modeling and consistency checking. Our tool is implemented to support a streamlined version of UML (sUML) with various diagrams such as class, use case, sequence, and state-machine. We showcase the tool's features with an example of a robotic arm, highlighting its effectiveness in collaborative consistency checking. We also compare our tool with related work, showing that collaborative features are currently lacking in the proposed tools. A video showcasing the tool is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kweKeBHx5Y