Merging UML2 composite structures of Software Product Lines

The software product line (SPL) engineering aims at producing reusable software-intensive systems at lower cost, in shorter time and with high quality. Modeling SPLs is a key concept for reuse: It allows stakeholders to describe commonalities and differences within a family of products. However modeling large-scale SPLs is complex and tedious. Therefore we advocate distributing the modeling task among different teams, each working on a partial model. At the end, it is obviously necessary to merge models designed by different team members in order to obtain the global model. In this paper, we propose a signature-based approach to merge UML composite structures of software product lines. UML2 composite structures are good alternative for modeling SPLs. They provide mechanisms for defining reusable "pieces" of the design. We also specify a set of significant properties to be considered when merging the SPL models and show how to preserve them.