Fragment-Based Consolidation of Model Variants

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Software systems are nowadays often developed using model-based development approaches. Examples include embedded systems in factory automation and in the automotive and avionic industries, as well as information systems. A variety of modelling languages has been developed for these application domains. Models are the primary development artefacts in model-based development. In many application scenarios, long-living system variants, and thus model variants, are being developed in parallel by autonomous developers. The maintenance of such product families is very costly, in order to reduce maintenance costs, variants should be aligned, or consolidated, on a regular basis such that they have as many common parts as possible ("grow-and-prune model"). This project aims at developing new functions and tools which support the evolution and maintenance of model-based product families by (a) analyses and presentations of the whole product family which inform developers about the commonalities and differences of the model variants, (b) consolidation operations and procedures which reduce the syntactic differences between the product variants and enlarge the common parts of variants. These functions shall be generically implemented and shall be adaptable to usual modelling languages with limited effort.