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Operational Transformation (OT) has emerged as a viable theoretical principle for the implementation of real-time collaboration applications. In such systems, the collaboration consists of operations generated by members of a group who are performing concurrent actions on the same document or content. This powerful multi-user co-editing has been researched ever since the seminal works of the late 1980s. As the web evolved into a dominant platform for content consumption and creation, classes of algorithms like OT and Conflict-free Replicated Data Types (CRDT) have enabled flexible content synchronization for applications such as online word processors. Despite their long history in academia, OT and CRDT continue to have unsolved issues due to the centralized approach required for scalable and reliable web-based document editing. This paper proposes a Control Loop-based OT approach based on a serverless architecture and on Finite State Automata (FSA). A control loop principle is used to design a series of algorithms for distributed conflict resolution. The proposed architecture consists of a series of blocks which internally contain a number of multi-level Finite State Machines. The architecture of the new serverless approach for OT is introduced and the basic FSAs that model the co-editing processes are described. Cases encountered in the dynamics of the co-editing processes were modeled to prove that the essential OT properties of causality preservation, convergence, and intention preservation are all satisfied. Simulation results are given at the end of the paper.
Gadea et al. (Fri,) studied this question.