Specifying Overlaps of Heterogeneous Models for Global Consistency Checking

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 \emph{multimodel}, and its elements
\emph{partial} or \emph{local} models. Since partial models overlap,
they may be consistent or inconsistent wrt. a set of \emph{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 its formal semantics based on category theory.