Guided Merging of Sequence Diagrams

The employment of optimistic model versioning systems allows multiple developers of a team to work independently on their local copies of a software model. The merging process towards one consolidated version obviously turns out to be error-prone and time-consuming when performed without any tool support. Recently, several sophisticated approaches for model merging have been presented. However, even for multi-view modeling languages like UML, which distribute the information on the modeled system over different views, these views are merged independently of each other. Hence, inconsistencies are likely to be introduced into the merged model. We suggest to solve this problem by exploiting information stored in one view as constraint for the computation of a consolidated version of another view. More specifically, we demonstrate how state machines can guide the integration of parallel changes performed on a sequence diagram. We give a concise formal description of this problem and suggest a translation to the satisfiability problem of propositional logic.