Lifting Multi-Domain Consistency Preservation to Variant-Rich Systems

Modern software-intensive systems require models of different engineering domains, such as electronics, mechanics, and software. Keeping these models consistent across domains is essential for designing a valid system. Software-intensive systems tend to be variant-rich because of market demands for individualization. The state of the art for consistency preservation in variant-rich systems is modeling each variant individually and applying consistency preservation mechanisms to them. This approach leads to redundant modeling of model elements shared between variants and does not scale for large systems. To solve this issue, we present a novel approach to combine multi-domain consistency preservation with delta-oriented variability modeling. By lifting the Vitruvius consistency preservation mechanism to delta models, we can preserve consistency for all variants simultaneously, avoid redundant modeling, and enable scalable consistency preservation for variant-rich multi-domain systems. Our evaluation shows this approach preserves consistency for all system variants and scales well enough to be applicable to large systems.