The Case for Batch Merge of Models – Issues and Challenges

Modelling is a fairly mature technology that is already being adopted by industry. Unfortunately the tools for supporting Model-Driven Engineering are not at the same level of maturity. In particular merge tools that are an important help for collaboration lack a lot to be desired in providing the support that is needed on industrial projects. Current model merge tools and research approaches focus on interactive merging where the developer resolves possible merge conflicts one by one during the merge process. However, developers are used to merge tools from the textual domain that work in a batch mode – the merge tool is provided with three files as input and produces a file with the proposed merge result – including possible unresolved merge conflicts. The developer can then pick up this result and resolve possible conflicts at a time and in an order that pleases him. In this visionary paper, we motivate why research should start to focus also on batch merge for models and we describe how it could work. Furthermore, we sketch the research agenda that is needed to address the issues and challenges in realizing batch merge for models.