Conflict management techniques for model merging: a systematic mapping review

Abstract

Model merging conflicts occur when different stakeholders aim to integrate their contradicting changes that are applied concurrently to update software models. We conduct an extensive systematic mapping study on conflict management techniques and relevant collaboration attributes to the versioning and merging models from 2001 to the middle of 2021. This study follows the standard guidelines within the software engineering domain. We analyzed a total of 105 articles extracted from an initial pool of more than 1800 articles to infer a taxonomy for conflict management techniques. We use this taxonomy to classify existing approaches to understand characteristics, shortcomings, and challenges on conflict management techniques in merging models. It also provides a solid foundation for future work in this area. We show that syntactic conflicts are the most studied type and that the top three popular conflict detection techniques are constraint violation, change overlapping, and pattern matching. We observe the lack of a comprehensive state-of-theart comparison between academic or industrial tools, as well as the need for real-world case studies. Finally, we show that recent trends have focused on online collaboration, where teams of stakeholders work on large-scale models.

A flexible operation-based infrastructure for collaborative model-driven engineering.

“…Furthermore, despite the engineers' preferred collaborative work styles, such systems usually offer only synchronous or asynchronous (mostly lock-based) sharing of produced artifacts or changes. As reported in literature reviews, there is a lack of approaches combining the requirements (Req1), (Req2), (Req3) mentioned in Section 2 together (Franzago et al 2018;Torres et al 2020;Sharbaf et al 2022). Hence, in the following, we present related works classifying them by their main active field.…”

“…Their approach gives support to synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, however, it also does not support conflict handling. Summary: Nevertheless, Franzago et al (Franzago et al 2018) and Sharbaf et al (Sharbaf et al 2022) show that no work has solved all our requirements together while focusing on a more versatile collaborative infrastructure with multi-domains where the engineers can work with their preferred collaborative work style. We conclude that a lock-free operation-based infrastructure for collaborative MDE composed of support for conflict detection, arbitrary pulling and pushing among concurrent users, and co-existing meta-models of various domains is still missing.…”

“…Multi-domain collaborative systems: Collaboration for multidomain is explored in many approaches (Torres et al 2020;Kanagasabai et al 2018;Kuryazov & Winter 2015;Sharbaf et al 2022). Koshima et al (Koshima & Englebert 2015) present an approach that is applied for conflict detection, reconciliation, and merging while collaboratively editing EMF models.…”

Cross-Platform Real-Time Collaborative Modeling: An Architecture and a Prototype Implementation via EMF.Cloud

“…In our work, we do not support conflict resolution for now. In the future, we aim to incorporate existing conflict management techniques for handling concurrent changes occurring during real-time collaboration sessions managed by BUMBLE-CE [41].…”

“…This approach for conflict management allows automatic resolution of all requests and enables BUMBLE-CE to handle all message requests with minimal processing which results in improved responsiveness. In future, we also aim to incorporate existing conflict management techniques for handling concurrent changes occurring during real-time collaboration sessions managed by BUMBLE-CE [41].…”