Systematic review of matching techniques used in model-driven methodologies

Abstract

Abstract In model-driven methodologies, model matching is the process of finding a matching pair for every model element between two or more software models. Model matching is an important task as it is often used while differencing and merging models, which are key processes in version control systems. There are a number of different approaches to model matching, with most of them focusing on different goals, i.e., the accuracy of the matching process, or the generality of the algorithm. Moreover, there exist algorithms that use the textual representations of the models during the matching process. We present a systematic literature review that was carried out to obtain the state-of-the-art of model matching techniques. The search process was conducted based on a well-defined methodology. We have identified a total of 3274 non-duplicate studies, out of which 119 have been included as primary studies for this survey. We present the state-of-the-art of model matching, highlighting the differences between different matching techniques, mainly focusing on text-based and graph-based algorithms. Finally, the main open questions, challenges, and possible future directions in the field of model matching are discussed, also including topics like benchmarking, performance and scalability, and conflict handling.