Version Control for Models: From Research to Industry
                         and Back Again
                                                        [Keynote]
                                                       Philip Langer
                                              EclipseSource Services GmbH
                                                     Vienna, Austria
                                            planger@eclipsesource.com

Keywords                                                            them. Several of those challenges are still open though
model version control; collaborative modeling; model diff &         and require a strong collaboration of researchers, technol-
merge; open-source modeling tools                                   ogy providers, and industrial users. Open-source platforms
                                                                    and technologies are a great opportunity to enable such a
                                                                    collaboration. This is also one of the key motivations be-
1.   ABSTRACT                                                       hind the Papyrus Industrial Consortium, which was founded
   Version control for models, including model diff & merge,        to foster collaboration among academia and industry in the
is not only a crucial prerequisite for a wide-spread adop-          area of open-source modeling tools based on Papyrus, EMF
tion of model-based engineering in industry, it also is and         Compare, and EGit.
has been a popular and very active research topic since
more than ten years. Several important algorithms and ap-
proaches emerged in the past to support the identification          2.   BIOGRAPHY
of differences among model versions, as well as to merge                                            Philip Langer is senior soft-
them into a new version. Many of those ideas have also been                                      ware architect and general
successfully transferred and implemented in proprietary and                                      manager of EclipseSource Ser-
open-source modeling tools used in industry.                                                     vices GmbH. He has more than
   During the last few years, especially Eclipse-based open-                                     eight years of experience in de-
source modeling tools, including support for version control                                     veloping modeling tools based
built on Papyrus, EMF Compare, and EGit, gained signifi-                                         on Eclipse technologies and is
cant attention and evolved into an industry-ready platform                                       an active committer on a num-
for building modeling tools in several domains. With this in-                                    ber of EMF-based technolo-
creasing industrial usage, however, the involved open-source                                     gies. Besides, he is architecture
technologies are challenged in different aspects ranging from                                    board member of the Papyrus
the requirement for full customizability, performance with          Industrial Consortium, where he leads the development of
very large models to usability supporting users with strongly       collaborative modeling tools to facilitate diff/merge of mod-
varying backgrounds.                                                els within Papyrus UML, SysML, and UML-RT. Philip au-
   In this talk, we report on our experiences gained from           thored more than 50 articles in scientific journals, confer-
moving from research in the area of model diff & merge to           ences, and workshops in the area of model-based engineer-
applying and enhancing open-source technologies, such as            ing and received the Award of Excellence by the Austrian
EMF Compare, EGit, and Papyrus for industrial use. We               Government in 2012 for his PhD thesis on model version-
discuss engineering and research challenges that we faced           ing and model transformation at the Vienna University of
when working with industrial users and how we approach              Technology.




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