Towards Examining the Complexity of Consistency

Modeling and model-driven processes offer abstraction as a means to cope with the increasing complexity of systems. As systems become more complex, additional stakeholders with diverse expertise contribute, leading to heterogeneous and federated models, each capturing a different perspective and abstraction. Since these models describe overlapping aspects of the same system, some information is shared, and thus redundancy is introduced. Maintaining consistency of such information across models is crucial to ensure that they collectively provide a coherent system representation. In fact, inconsistencies can lead to errors in system development, making consistency necessary for system correctness. In addition, when the system is critical to safety, the correctness must be established with the highest level of guarantee, for example, achieved by formal verification. In this context, understanding which aspects of the consistency’s complexity influence the complexity of verification may allow for more efficient verification techniques. In this paper, we examine the complexity of consistency for managing and mitigating verification efforts, to ultimately systematically reduce unnecessary complexity while ensuring the required consistency.