Semantic model differencing based on execution traces

Abstract

Managing the evolution of software artifacts is a crucial issue in software engineering. As in the software engineering paradigm model-driven engineering (MDE), the main software artifacts are models, managing the evolution of models constitutes a key concern in MDE. One important technique in this realm is model differencing, which is concerned with identifying differences among different versions of models. While the majority of existing model differencing approaches use a purely syntactic approach, we propose an approach that takes the semantics of models into account. In particular, our approach utilizes the behavioral semantics of the used modeling language to execute the models to be compared and obtain execution traces constituting the models' semantic interpretation. By comparing the obtained execution traces, semantic differences among the models are identified.