Fulfilling Industrial Needs for Consistency Among Engineering Artifacts

Maintaining the consistency of engineering artifacts is a challenge faced by several engineering companies. This is more evident when the engineering artifacts are created using different tools and have different formats. This is the context of a company that builds agricultural machines, where components are developed using a decentralized iterative process. In this study, we present an approach developed in collaboration with an industry partner to address the issues and requirements of a real engineering scenario. These issues include the manual execution of consistency checking, without guidelines that formalize the activity. Furthermore, the industry partner aims at a flexible solution that can be applied without disrupting the current development process significantly. The proposed approach applies consistency rules (CR) defined to automatically detect and provide inconsistency feedback to engineers in real-time. The approach presented in this work also allows the customization of the CRs, giving flexibility to how the consistency checking is applied. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated in such an industrial scenario, with a discussion about how the issues were addressed and the limitations of the current solution. We also perform a scalability evaluation showing that the approach can be applied in large systems (up to 21,061 elements) in a reasonable amount of time, taking less than 0.25 milliseconds to apply a CR, in the worst cases.