Detecting Semantic Equivalence in UML Class Diagrams

When developing a system in Model-driven Engineering (MDE), developers change the same diagram in parallel. These changes generate different versions that may conflict. Conflicts can be syntactic, related to the structure of the diagram, or semantic, related to the meaning of the diagram. The detection of semantic conflicts in diagrams should take into consideration both the syntax and semantics. This is necessary because languages like UML provide different representations that produce the same meaning. Therefore, syntactically different diagrams may be semantically equivalent. Thus, conflict detection methods must understand the semantics of diagrams to reduce the occurrence of false positive and false negative conflicts. This paper presents a semantic conflict detection method for UML class diagrams. It verifies if two versions of a class diagram are semantically equivalent, if one version semantically contains the other, or if they are semantically conflicting. Keywords-component; model version control; semantic equivalence; semantic conflict detection; UML class diagram.