Managing Models through Macromodeling

Software development involves the creation and use of many related models yet there are few tools that address the issue of how to work with and manage such collections of models, or "multimodels." We propose a formal multimodeling framework that allows specialized model relationship types to be defined on existing types of models and provides a new type of model with a formal semantics called a macromodel. Macromodels can be used to enhance multimodel development, comprehension, consistency management and evolution. A preliminary evaluation of the framework is done using a detailed example from the telecommunications domain.