A category-theoretical approach to the formalisation of version control in MDE

Abstract

In Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) models are the primary artefacts of the software development process. Similar to other software artefacts, models undergo a complex evolution during their life cycles. Version control is one of the key techniques which enables developers to tackle this complexity. Traditional version control systems are based on the copy-modify-merge paradigm which is not fully exploited in MDE because of the lack of model-specific techniques. In this paper we give a formalisation of the copy-modify-merge paradigm in MDE. In particular, we analyse how common models and merge models can be defined by means of category-theoretical constructions. Moreover, we show how the properties of those constructions can be used to identify model differences and conflicting modifications.