Consistence preserving model merge in collaborative development processes

Abstract

Specification by models plays a decisive role, during the development process of complex systems. The division and concurrency of labor in teams is a further characteristic of such development. Therefore an efficient configuration and variant management of resulting documents is essential. In practice, a lot of established configuration management systems like CVS and Subversion are available which provide a text based merge. Unfortunately these systems are inappropriate for the management of models because they ignore the syntactic and semantic structure which is specified by the associated meta-models. Especially during the merge of model versions the mentioned systems fails at the generation of a meta-model consistent model. In this paper a proposal is presented which is enabled to merge model versions in a model based, collaborative development process. Furthermore meta-model independent methods for consistent-receiving model merging are explained.