Preventing Information Loss in Incremental Model Synchronization by Reusing Elements

The development of complex mechatronic systems requires the close collaboration of multiple engineering disciplines. Hence, multidisciplinary system engineering approaches have been developed. However, the refinement of discipline-specific aspects of the system, for example the implementation of software controllers, still requires discipline-specific models and tools. During the development, changes in these discipline-specific models may affect other disciplines’ models. Thus, inconsistencies are likely to occur, leading to increased development time and costs if they remain undetected. Bidirectional model synchronization techniques aim at automatically resolving such inconsistencies. Existing synchronization algorithms today, however, fail in this application scenario, because synchronization steps often unnecessarily destroy and re-create elements, which damages parts of the models that are not subject to the synchronization. In order to solve these issues, we present a novel synchronization technique based on Triple Graph Grammars with improvements regarding the reuse of model elements.