Managing Model Conflicts in Distributed Development

The growing complexity of current software systems naturally conveyed their development toward incremental and distributed approaches to speed up the process. Several developers update the same artefact operating concurrent manipulations which need to be coherently combined. The interaction among those changes inevitably involves conflicts which must be detected and reconciled. This paper proposes a domain specific language able to define and manage conflicts caused by cooperative updates over the same model elements. The approach relies on a model-based representation of model differences and enables the specification and the detection of both syntactical and semantic conflicts.