Scalable N-Way Model Matching Using Multi-Dimensional Search Trees

Model matching algorithms are used to identify common elements in input models, which is a fundamental precondition for many software engineering tasks, such as merging software variants or views. If there are multiple input models, an n-way matching algorithm that simultaneously processes all models typically produces better results than the sequential application of two-way matching algorithms. However, existing algorithms for n-way matching do not scale well, as the computational effort grows fast in the number of models and their size. We propose a scalable n-way model matching algorithm, which uses multi-dimensional search trees for efficiently finding suitable match candidates through range queries. We implemented our generic algorithm named RaQuN (Range Queries on N input models) in Java, and empirically evaluate the matching quality and runtime performance on several datasets of different origin and model type. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our experimental results show a performance improvement by an order of magnitude, while delivering matching results of better quality.