Using Macromodels to Manage Collections of Related Models

The creation and manipulation of multiple related models is common in software development, however there are few tools that help to manage such collections of models. We propose a framework in which different types of model relationships -- such as submodelOf and refinementOf -- can be formally defined and used with a new type of model, called a macromodel, to express the required relationships between models at a high-level of abstraction. Macromodels can be used to support the development, comprehension, consistency management and evolution of sets of related models. We illustrate the framework with a detailed example from the telecommunications industry and describe a prototype implementation.