Specifying and Recognizing Model Changes in Networks of Models

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Model-based software development has become a widely accepted approach for embedded systems and in application domains where software must be maintainable and long-living. Models are subject to continuous change and have many versions during their lifetime. The specification and recognition of changes in models is the key to understand and manage the evolution of a model-based system. However, currently available versioning tools operate on low-level, sometimes tool-specific model representations. The resulting differences are often not understandable. It is a largely open problem how to use high-level edit operations, e.g. as offered by modern refactoring tools, to present and handle model differences and to analyse the evolution of models. The tight integration of editing and versioning tools requires consistent specifications of edit operations; this integration is another open problem. This project adresses both problems by consistently lifting model versioning concepts, techniques, and tools from low-level to high-level model changes. All concepts shall be formalized by graph transformation concepts in order to reason about complex model modifications and their inter-relations. Our approach will be implemented and evaluated based on the widely used Eclipse Modeling Project.