Domain-specific conflict resolution and model merge

Collaboratively evolving models often necessitate conflict resolution for a cohesive successive version. Resolution can be manual or automated, requiring a sophisticated understanding of change and conflict semantics. While existing version control systems emphasize abstract syntax and fine-grained conflicts, they fall short in catering to user-friendly conflict resolution rule definition for domain experts. Moreover, they visualize conflict resolution concepts based on abstract syntax rather than the concrete syntax of the DSL.

  To overcome these challenges, we introduced DSMCompare, a tool for comparing domain-specific models, detecting differences, and visualizing conflicts using DSL's concrete syntax. This paper presents enhancements to automate conflict resolution and introduces features for user assistance, including automatically generated domain-specific editors for defining resolution rules.

  Our evaluation, conducted on the reverse-engineered commit history of various open-source projects, demonstrates DSMCompare's effectiveness in achieving highly accurate automatic conflict resolution with minimal manual intervention. A user study further validates the tool, revealing a significant decrease in resolution time coupled with higher accuracy and user satisfaction.