Policy-Driven Change Management in Model Based Systems Engineering

By: Anish Bhobe, Dominique Blouin, Laurent Pautet

Abstract

Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) uses models for designing, validating and synthesizing complex systems. Different models for large systems are synchronized via transformations, but current Model Management (MoM) approaches lack mechanisms to control or audit changes propagation. Managing such changes is very challenging, especially when the propagated modifications are unauthorized or rejected by downstream teams. This paper introduces Senate, the first fine-grained change propagation control framework based on declarative change policies. Senate provides a declarative domain-specific language to specify policies to provide consistent change propagation in scenarios where changes may be rejected by models. These policies govern which users are permitted to create, modify or delete model fragments based on the affected elements, their types, or if they match given patterns. By enforcing these policies during consistency management, Senate prevents unauthorized or undesired changes from being propagated, thus reducing the delay between introduction of the inconsistency and its discovery during review. We implement and evaluate a prototype of Senate which shows the feasibility and scalability of the approach in an non-intrusive way, without requiring modifications to the models or the consistency management approaches required. We evaluate the design to show that declarative change policies are generalizable, non-intrusive to existing tools, and scalable with respect to the size of models and number of changes, and thus can be integrated into existing consistency management workflows in multi-model collaborative MBSE scenarios.

Keywords

Model Based Systems Engineering, Model Management, Change Policy

Cite as:

Anish Bhobe, Dominique Blouin, Laurent Pautet, “Policy-Driven Change Management in Model Based Systems Engineering”, Journal of Object Technology, Volume 25, no. 3 ( 2026), pp. 3:253-266, doi:10.5381/jot.2026.25.3.a20.