Large software projects are characterized by distributed environments consisting of teams at different organizations and geographical locations. These teams typically build multiple overlapping models, representing different perspectives, different versions across time, different variants in a product family, different development concerns, etc. Keeping track of the relationships between these models, constructing a global view, and managing consistency are major challenges.

Model Management is concerned with describing the relationships between distributed models, i.e., models built in a distributed development environment, and providing systematic operators to manipulate these models and their relationships. Such operators include, among others, Match, for finding relationships between disparate models, Merge, for combining models with respect to known or hypothesized relationships between them, Slice, for producing projections of models and relationships based on given criteria, and Check-Consistency, for verifying models and relationships against the consistency properties of interest.

In this thesis, we provide automated solutions for two key model management operators, Merge and Check-Consistency. The most novel aspects of our work on model merging are (1) the ability to combine arbitrarily large collections of interrelated models and (2) support for toleration of incompleteness and inconsistency. Our consistency checking technique employs model merging to reduce the problem of checking inter-model consistency to checking intra-model consistency of a merged model. This enables a flexible way of verifying global consistency properties that is not possible with other existing approaches.

We develop a prototype tool, TReMer+, implementing our merge and consistency checking approaches. We use TReMer+ to demonstrate that our contributions facilitate understanding and refinement of the relationships between distributed models.