An Introduction to Model Versioning

With the emergence of model-driven engineering (MDE), software models are considered as central artifacts in the software engineering process, going beyond their traditional use as sketches. In MDE, models rather act as the single source of information for automatically generating executable software. This shift poses several new research challenges. One of these challenges constitutes model versioning, which targets at enabling efficient team-based development of models. This compelling challenge induced a very active research community, who yielded remarkable methods and techniques ranging from model differencing to merging of models. In this tutorial, we give an introduction to the foundations of model versioning, the underlying technologies for processing models and their evolution, as well as the state of the art in model versioning. Thereby, we aim at equipping students and researchers alike that are new to this domain with enough information for commencing to contribute to this challenging research area.