Christoph Treude, Stefan Berlik, Sven Wenzel, Udo Kelter. Difference computation of large models. In Ivica Crnkovic, Antonia Bertolino, editors, Proceedings of the 6th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, 2007, Dubrovnik, Croatia, September 3-7, 2007. pages 295-304, ACM, 2007. [doi]
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.