Property-Based Methods for Collaborative Model Development

Industrial applications of mo del-driven engineering to de- velop large and complex systems resulted in an increasing demand for collab oration features. However, use cases such as mo del di�erencing and merging have turned out to b e a di�cult challenge, due to (i) the graph- like nature of mo dels, and (ii) the complexity of certain op erations (e.g. hierarchy refactoring) that are common to day. In the pap er, we present a novel search-based automated mo del merge approach where rule-based design space exploration is used to search the space of solution candi- dates that represent con�ict-free merged mo dels. Our metho d also allows engineers to easily incorp orate domain-sp eci�c knowledge into the merge pro cess to provide b etter solutions. The merge pro cess automatically cal- culates multiple merge candidates to b e presented to domain exp erts for �nal selection. Furthermore, we prop ose to adopt a generic synthetic b enchmark to carry out an initial scalability assessment for mo del merge with large mo dels and large change sets.