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Schrodinger equations with nonlinearities concentrated in some regions of space are good models of various physical situations and have interesting mathematical properties. We show that in the semiclassical limit it is possible to separate the relevant degrees of freedom by noting that in the regions where the nonlinearities are effective all states are suppressed but the metastable ones (resonances). In this way the description of the nonlinear regions is reduced to ordinary differential equations weakly coupled to standard Schrodinger equations valid in the linear regions. The idea is illustrated through the study of a prototype equation recently proposed for resonant tunneling of electrons through a double barrier heterostructure and for which nonlinear oscillations have been numerically predicted. © 1995 Academic Press, Inc. I