Consensus-Free Spreadsheet Integration

09/28/2022
by   Brandon Baylor, et al.
0

We describe a method for merging multiple spreadsheets into one sheet, and/or exchanging data among the sheets, by expressing each sheet's formulae as an algebraic (equational) theory and each sheet's values as a model of its theory, expressing the overlap between the sheets as theory and model morphisms, and then performing colimit, lifting, and Kan-extension constructions from category theory to compute a canonically universal integrated theory and model, which can then be expressed as a spreadsheet. Our motivation is to find methods of merging engineering models that do not require consensus (agreement) among the authors of the models being merged, a condition fulfilled by our method because theory and model morphisms are semantics-preserving. We describe a case study of this methodology on a real-world oil and gas calculation at a major energy company, describing the theories and models that arise when integrating two different casing pressure test (MASP) calculation spreadsheets constructed by two non-interacting engineers. We also describe the automated theorem proving burden associated with both verifying the semantics preservation of the overlap mappings as well as verifying the conservativity/consistency of the resulting integrated sheet. We conclude with thoughts on how to apply the methodology to scale engineering efforts across the enterprise.

READ FULL TEXT

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset