Specifying overlaps of heterogeneous models for global consistency checking

Abstract

Software development often involves a set of models defined in different metamodels, each model capturing a specific view of the system. We call this set a mutlimodel, and its elements partial or local models. Since partial models overlap, they may be consistent or inconsistent wrt. a set of global constraints. We present a framework for specifying overlaps between partial models and defining their global consistency. An advantage of the framework is that heterogeneous consistency checking is reduced to the homogeneous case yet merging partial metamodels into one global metamodel is not needed. We illustrate the framework with examples and sketch a formal semantics for it based on category theory.