Difference computation of large models

• Main Authors: TREUDE, Christoph, BERLIK, Stefan, WENZEL, Sven, KELTER, Udo
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2007
• Subjects: Differences; Models; Search trees; Versioning; Software Engineering
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8854; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/9857/viewcontent/fse07.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Modern software engineering practices lead to large models which exist in many versions. Version management systems should offer a service to compare, and possibly merge, these models. The computation of a difference between large models is a big challenge; current algorithms are too inefficient here. We present a new technique for computing differences between models. In practical tests, this technique has been an order of magnitude faster than currently known algorithms. The main idea is to use a high-dimensional search tree for efficiently finding similar model elements. Individual elements are mapped onto a vector of numerical values using a collection of metrics for models and a numerical representation of the names which occur in a model.