Models in Conflict – Detection of Semantic Conflicts in Model-based Development

To make the model-driven paradigm a widespread success, appropriate tools such as version control systems (VCS) are required to adequately support a model-based development process. However, first approaches specializing on model-based versioning, do not take into account the semantics of the artefacts they operate upon. Thus, conflict detection mechanisms are based on detecting conflicting concurrent modifications on a software artefacts syntactic representation, only, without explicitly considering the semantics the artefact stands for. As opposed to a heavyweight approach relying on formal mathematics, we follow a lightweight approach that is based on creating views of a model that explicate a certain aspect of a modeling language’s semantics. Such a view is created through a model transformation from the original model edited by the developers. Using both the original model and the created view our approach relies on graph-based comparison strategies to detect conflicts due to concurrent editing to determine socalled syntactic and semantic conflicts, respectively. Consequently, by means of various example scenarios, we demonstrate how our approach is able detect conflicts that otherwise would remain undetected.