Model Patches in Model-Driven Engineering

Increasingly, recording the various kinds of design-level structural evolution that a system undergoes throughout its entire life-cycle is gaining relevance in software modeling and development. In this respect, an interesting and useful operation between subsequent system versions is model difference consisting in calculation, representation, and visualization. This work shows how to generalize the application of differences, represented as first-class artefacts, in order to abstract from persistent identifiers and enable more flexibility. Then, modifications can be applied as model patches to arbitrary models according to weaving specifications.