Abstract Engineering projects involve a variety of artifacts such as requirements, design, or source code. These artifacts, many of which tend to be interdependent, are often manipulated concurrently. To keep artifacts consistent, engineers must continuously consider their work in relation to the work of multiple other engineers. Traditional consistency checking approaches reason efficiently over artifact changes and their consistency implications. However, they do so solely within the boundaries of specific tools and their specific artifacts (e.g., consistency checking between different UML models). This makes it difficult to examine the consistency between different types of artifacts (e.g., consistency checking between UML models and the source code). Global consistency checking can help addressing this problem. However, it usually requires a disruptive and time-consuming merging process for artifacts. This article presents a novel, cloud-based approach to global consistency checking in a multi-developer/-tool engineering environment. It allows for global consistency checking across all artifacts that engineers work on concurrently. Moreover, it reasons over artifact changes immediately after the change happened, while keeping the (memory/CPU) cost of consistency checking minimal. The feasibility and scalability of our approach were demonstrated by a prototype implementation and through an empirical validation.

Abstract In today's engineering projects, companies continuously have to adapt their systems to changing customers or dynamic market requirements. This requires a flexible, iterative development process in which different parts of the system under construction are built and updated concurrently. However, concurrent engineering becomes quite challenging in domains where different engineering artifacts from different disciplines come into play, such as safety‐critical cyber‐physical systems, where the involved engineering artifacts are quite heterogeneous in nature. In such systems, it is of utmost importance that different artifacts remain consistent in order to guarantee a correctly functioning end product. In this article, we discuss our experiences (with a leading company working in the areas of production automation and product processing) in maintaining the consistency between electrical models and the corresponding software controller, when both are subject to continuous changes. The article discusses how we let engineers describe the relationships between electrical models and the corresponding software controller code in the form of links and consistency rules. Additionally, we demonstrate that how our approach, through a process of continuous consistency checking, notifies engineers about the erroneous impact of their changes in various engineering artifacts.