| The high complexity and diversity of today's design projects demands the participation of multiple experts. The participating experts can influence the design process by sharing their perspective, expertise and resources. The involvement of various experts is often known as collaborative modeling and design. A collaborative modeling environment can encompass various geographical or organizational boundaries.;The contributions of the work in this thesis can be briefly enumerated as follows: 1) the development of Subjective belief bases that address uncertainty; 2) the formalization of a multi-stage belief integration game for the integration of multiple Subjective belief bases; and 3) the provisioning of an analogy between Subjective belief bases and software conceptual models. The proposed models are implemented in two Eclipse plug-ins and are thoroughly evaluated from various perspectives. We evaluate our proposed processes through a real-world case study where a group of Computer Science graduate students participate in the study. In addition, we employ a multi-agent simulation to test the convergence and effectiveness of the introduced formal concepts of the thesis. The evaluations have been performed on the basis of the accuracy, precision, and recall of the final conceptual models, as well as the four scales of the Computer System Usability Questionnaire. The results of the evaluations have been reported in this thesis.;Such collaboration between experts can result in outcomes that may be in practice either inconsistent, vague or incomplete. In this thesis, we provide a correspondence between software conceptual models and annotated propositional belief bases. Through this analogy, we are able to analyze the contents of a given set of software conceptual models, which have been developed by the participants (known as viewpoints) of a collaborative modeling process and specify whether they are incomplete, incoherent, or inconsistent under a closed-world reasoning assumption. Based on the software conceptual models' properties introduced in this thesis, we define an integration game through which the possible inconsistencies of the software conceptual models are resolved. The game consists of several rounds of negotiation and is performed by two main functions, namely choice and enhancement functions. The outcome of this game is a set of inconsistency-free software conceptual models that can be easily integrated to form a unique fair representative of the opinions of the participants. |
