Configurable three‐way model merging

Abstract

SummarySoftware development is a collaborative activity that requires teams of software engineers to cooperate and work in parallel on versions of models. However, model management techniques such as model differencing, merging, and versioning have turned out to be difficult challenges, due to the complexity of operations and graph‐like nature of models. Therefore, a well‐developed support for model merging process, as well as conflict management, is highly desired. This paper presents a novel process for model merging, called the Epsilon‐based Three‐way Merging Process (E3MP) process. Model merging is a significant problem where there are different versions of a system model amongst modeler teams. E3MP includes three components implemented into the Epsilon framework. First, modelers can define domain‐specific rules that customize the merging process. Second, E3MP enables an automated method for syntactic and semantic conflict detection amongst different versions of the system model. Third, E3MP puts forward a pattern‐based approach for conflict resolution. We applied two generic benchmarks to assess conflict detection and resolution capabilities of our approach and carried out an initial scalability evaluation for the model merge with large models and large change sets. The results of our experiments revealed that the proposed process allows generating consistent and semantically correct merged models.