Enhancing version control with domain-specific semantics

As Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSML) become more widespread, it is now possible for non-computer scientists to design complex systems. Not only do DSMLs make modeling more accessible to domain experts, they also improve their efficiency. Using such models, the problem of their maintenance and evolution arises, with common software engineering issues, such as reversibility and traceability of developments. In this article we present the integration of a collaborative edition process into a model-driven engineering (MDE) simulation platform defining its own DSML, which includes a serialization procedure. Our novel approach defines a collaborative work and version control process. This process uses the concrete textual syntax defined by this DSML, which allows us to use the features of existing Version Control Systems (VCS) to work with serialized models, and helps calculate the differences between two versions of a model, merge versions of these models, and detect merge conflicts.