Proactive Conflict Detection for Collaborative Software Design

FLAME is an extensible framework that detects design-level conflicts in real-time, enabling distributed teams to collaborate more effectively on complex software architectures.

What is FLAME?

A comprehensive solution for managing complexity in collaborative software design

FLAME (Framework for Logging and Analyzing Modeling Events) is an extensible collaborative software design framework that provides facilities to detect design-level conflicts in a proactive way—before architects manually perform detection.

By capturing modeling changes as they are made and performing trial merging and conflict detection in the background, FLAME immediately detects newly arising conflicts and presents the results to architects. This proactive approach significantly reduces the cost and complexity of conflict resolution in distributed software development teams.

The framework explicitly handles resource-intensive computations necessary for high-order conflict detection by parallelizing and offloading the burden to remote nodes, ensuring that outstanding conflicts can be detected in reasonable time even with limited resources.

Key Features

Advanced capabilities for modern collaborative software development

Proactive Conflict Detection

Detects design conflicts before manual merging, enabling teams to address issues early in the development process when they're easier and less costly to resolve.

  • Real-time conflict detection
  • Background trial merging
  • Immediate architect notification

Extensible Architecture

Designed with flexibility in mind, FLAME can integrate with various modeling tools and consistency checkers appropriate for your target system's domain.

  • Pluggable modeling tool adapters
  • Custom consistency checkers
  • Domain-specific extensions

Distributed Processing

Leverages distributed computing to handle resource-intensive conflict detection, ensuring scalability for large projects and complex architectural models.

  • Parallel conflict detection
  • Remote node offloading
  • Smart priority algorithms

Award-Winning Research

"Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design" won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017)

Publications & Patents

Peer-reviewed research and intellectual property

  • Continuous Design Conflicts: Costs and Solutions

    Jae Young Bang and Nenad Medvidovic
    IEEE Software, 2018
    Read Paper →

  • Continuous Analysis of Collaborative Design

    Jae Young Bang, Yuriy Brun, and Nenad Medvidovic
    IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2017)
    🏆 Best Paper Award
    Read Paper →

  • Proactive Detection of Higher-Order Software Design Conflicts

    Jae Young Bang and Nenad Medvidovic
    12th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2015)
    Read Paper → | DOI →

  • US Patent: Extensible Collaborative Software Modeling

    US Patent Application US-2012-0089960-A1
    Published April 14, 2012
    View Patent →

Downloads

Get started with FLAME and its components

FLAME Core

Server, Client, and Detection Engine

FLAME Adapter

GME-XTEAM Integration

Documentation

User Guide and Setup Instructions

Research Data

Experimental Data Archive (~14MB)

Contributors

The researchers and institutions behind FLAME

Jae Young Bang

Cyberonix Experts, LLC

Website |

Yuriy Brun

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Website |

Nenad Medvidovic

University of Southern California

Website |