Consistency Checking of Conceptual Models via Model Merging

Requirements elicitation involves the construction of large sets of conceptual models. An important step in the analysis of these models is checking their consistency. Ex-isting research largely focuses on checking consistency of individual models and of relationships between pairs of models. However, such strategy does not guarantee global consistency. In this paper, we propose a consistency check-ing approach that addresses this problem for homogeneous models. Given a set of models and a set of relation-ships between them, our approach works by first construct-ing a merged model and then verifying this model against the consistency constraints of interest. By keeping proper traceability links, consistency diagnostics obtained over the merge are projected back to the original models and their relationships. A second contribution of the paper is the de-velopment of a set of reusable expressions for defining con-sistency constraints in conceptual modelling. We demon-strate the use of the developed expressions in the specifica-tion of consistency rules for class and ER diagrams, i ∗ goal models, and hierarchical state machines.