Efficient Consistency Checking of Interrelated Models

Software design normally requires a collection of interdependent models conforming to different metamodels. These multi-models present different views of interest and may be consistent only if they simultaneously satisfy a set of inter-model constraints. A straightforward approach to inter-model consistency checking is to run constraint validations on the model union (merge). If, in model repairing scenarios, single constraints are (re-)checked, these validations are carried out on a small view (localization) of a big model merge. This “merge-prior-to-localization”-approach is not efficient, because of considerable matching and merging workload. We propose to perform early localization in order to reduce the data space being subject to commonality search. The algorithm is based on a new method to formally specify the inter-relation of an arbitrary number of heterogeneously typed models.