Improving inconsistency resolution with side-effect evaluation and costs

Abstract. Consistency management is a major requirement in software engineering. Although this problem has attracted significant attention in the literature, support for inconsistency resolution is still not standard for modeling tools. In this paper, we introduce explicit side-effect expres-sions for each inconsistency resolution and costs for each inconsistency type. This allows a fine-grained evaluation of each possible inconsistency resolution for a particular inconsistent model. We further show how an inconsistency resolution module for a modeling tool can be designed and implemented based on our approach. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach for resolution of inconsistencies between object life cycles and process models.