Patent attributes
An industrial integrated development environment (IDE) supports collaborative development of industrial projects, such as human-machine interface applications, industrial controller programs, device configurations, or other such projects. Rather than merging edits by comparing text representations of the edited projects on a line-by-line basis, the system expresses the edited and base versions of the system project as unified information models that represent the project versions as hierarchical organizations of nodes representing elements of the project, and compares corresponding nodes of the information models to obtain differential statuses for the nodes. The various versions of the nodes are then merged into a single consistent model based on the differential statuses of the nodes.
