Difference computation of large models

  • Authors:
  • Christoph Treude;Stefan Berlik;Sven Wenzel;Udo Kelter

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany;University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany;University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany;University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the the 6th joint meeting of the European software engineering conference and the ACM SIGSOFT symposium on The foundations of software engineering
  • Year:
  • 2007

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

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.