The change management (CM) and version control mechanisms used in the mechanical and software domains are presented in the product lifecycle management (PLM) and application lifecycle management (ALM) approaches, respectively. Based on their comparison, this paper discusses branching/merging concepts and utilises them to propose an evolution of the product data management (PDM) functions of PLM, thereby allowing PLM to become a collaborative platform common to software and hardware engineers. This evolution is an opportunity to develop a three-way merge tool for CAD documents. Recent works on model-merging techniques from the software development domain are evaluated in the process.
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Bricogne et al. (2014) studied this question.
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