Tolerance in Model-Driven Engineering: A Systematic Literature Review with Model-Driven Tool Support

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews how tolerance to inconsistencies is handled in Model-Driven Engineering, highlighting current approaches, benefits, drawbacks, and proposing a tool-chain for conducting and reproducing systematic literature reviews.

Contribution

It provides a structured overview of tolerance in MDE and introduces a novel tool-chain to facilitate systematic literature reviews in computer science.

Findings

Tolerance relates to managing inconsistency in MDE.

Existing work discusses benefits and drawbacks of tolerant approaches.

A tool-chain for conducting and reproducing SLRs is proposed.

Abstract

Managing models in a consistent manner is an important task in the field of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE). Although restoring and maintaining consistency is desired in general, recent work has pointed out that always strictly enforcing consistency at any point of time is often not feasible in real-world scenarios, and sometimes even contrary to what a user expects from a trustworthy MDE tool. The challenge of tolerating inconsistencies has been discussed from different viewpoints within and outside the modelling community, but there exists no structured overview of existing and current work in this regard. In this paper, we provide such an overview to help join forces tackling the unresolved problems of tolerating inconsistencies in MDE. We follow the standard process of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to point out what tolerance means, how it relates to uncertainty, which examples for tolerant software systems have already been discussed, and which benefits and drawbacks tolerating inconsistencies entails. Furthermore, we propose a tool-chain that helps conducting SLRs in computer science and also eases the reproduction of results. Relevant meta-data of the collected sources is uniformly described in a textual modelling language and exported to the graph database Neo4j to query aggregated information.