A UML profile for modeling the conflicts in model merging

To the challenge entailed by the complexity and size of software systems, developers have to cooperate and work in parallel on software models. Models are changed separately, and they should be merged periodically to obtain an integrated single model. This leads to conflict in merging models. Therefore, several approaches have been proposed to detect such conflicts. For some conflict detection approaches, it is required to describe conflict constraints which are an open issue. In contribution to the solution of this problem, we present a UML profile for modeling conflict conditions which can be used for automatic generation of required constraints. This profile helps to build a conflict model by exploiting example of models which participate in the model merging process. Hence, software engineers are able to define conflicts via a concrete graphical syntax in a familiar UML editor. To evaluate the proposed profile, a case study consisting of two conflicts is performed that shows the usefulness of this profile.