Using model comparison to maintain model-to-standard compliance

Keeping an artifact, such as a an industrial design document or a process description, compliant with a relevant standard or norm is a challenging task. A wide variety of organizations, ranging from software houses to defense contractors, are concerned with this problem, since norm compliance (or lack thereof) can have important technical and business related consequences for them. In this paper, we discuss a compliance maintenance approach for complex structured documents that we are currently developing at Fraunhofer IESE. At the heart of this approach lies our Evolyzer model comparison tool and its underlying model comparison approach, DeltaProcess.