Existing modeling frameworks have limited collaboration capabilities. Collaboration at the model level is one of the top desired features. However, most solutions rely on cloud-based and centralized databases as their technological solution. While these solutions ease collaboration among connected partners by employing concurrency control techniques, they do not support disconnected collaboration scenarios, which is an important feature for designing local-first software. This situation presents a significant compromise: utilizing cloud-based solutions with loss of data ownership control versus adopting separate instances without collaborative capabilities.

The objective of this postdoctoral project is to contribute to and extend an existing local-first Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) framework, built upon specialized Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). The goal is to enable real-time collaboration through modeling-specific CRDTs. The proposed approach involves extending a middleware communication layer utilizing CRDTs to
seamlessly synchronize distributed, offline-capable engineering models.

The postdoctoral researcher will conduct a state-of-the-art review of communication and group membership approaches in P2P environments. One major issue to be taken into account is the entry and exit of members in a group, so the CRDT state is always
coherent. The components will be integrated into our CRDT and modeling framework.