Fragment-Based Consolidation of Model Variants

如今，软件系统通常使用基于模型的开发方法进行开发。例如，工厂自动化、汽车和航空电子工业中的嵌入式系统，以及信息系统。已经为这些应用领域开发了各种建模语言。模型是基于模型的开发中的主要开发构件。在许多应用场景中，自主开发人员正在并行开发长寿命的系统变体，从而也就是模型变体。这类产品系列的维护成本非常高，为了降低维护成本，应定期调整或合并各种变体，以使它们具有尽可能多的共同部分(“生长和修剪模型”)。该项目旨在开发新的功能和工具，支持基于模型的产品族的演变和维护，方法是：(A)分析和介绍整个产品族，告知开发人员模型变体的共性和差异；(B)合并操作和程序，缩小产品变体之间的句法差异，扩大变体的共同部分。这些功能应该是通用实现的，并且应该能够以有限的努力适应通常的建模语言。

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.