A Graph-Pattern Based Approach for Meta-Model Specific Conflict Detection in a General-Purpose Model Versioning System

Model driven engineering is the key paradigm in many large system development efforts today. A good versioning system for models is essential for change management and coordinated development of these systems. Support for conflict detection and reconciliation is one of the key functionalities of a versioning system. A large system uses a large number of different kinds of models, each specifying a different aspect of the system. The notion of conflict is relative to the semantics of a meta-model. Hence conflicts should be detected and reported in a meta-model specific way. In this paper we discuss a general purpose model versioning system that can work with models of any meta-model, and a graph-pattern based approach for specifying conflicts in a meta-model specific way. We also present an efficient algorithm that uses these graph-patterns to detect conflicts at the right level of abstraction.