Towards a Generic and Extensible Merge Operator

Merging is a common way to compose both crosscutting and noncrosscutting models. In this paper, we argue that merge can be defined more generically as an operator at the meta-modelling level. By describing merge at this level, a merge operator can be used to compose models based on meta-models other than UML. There are various merge variants and we concede that a full unification of all merge semantics may be infeasible. To define a common merge, we propose the definition of a common merge kernel as a semantic base that can be extended to realise the different expressions of merge.