Towards a Distributed Modeling Process Based on Composite Models

The rising impact of software development in globally distributed teams strengthens the need for strategies that establish a clear separation of concerns in software models. Dealing with large, weakly modularized models and conflicting changes on interrelated models are typical obstacles to be witnessed. This paper proposes a structured process for distributed modeling based on the modularization technique provided by composite models with explicit interfaces. It provides a splitting activity for decomposing large models, discusses asynchronous and synchronous editing steps in relation to consistency management and provides a merge activity allowing the reuse of code generators. All main concepts of composite modeling are precisely defined based on category theory.