On the consistency of cardinality constraints in UML modelling
Faouzi Boufarès, Hachémi Bennaceur, Aomar Osmani · 2026
Database designers are highly prone to make many mistakes when structuring the relevant information. Data definition is usually accompanied with some constraint declarations to capture more semantics. Multiplicity (or cardinality) constraints are among the most popular classes of constraints in database models. Nowadays, each constraint class representation is well-studied. However, conflicts are not detected between them and the global coherence is seldom covered. Our purpose is then to give a tool to detect possible conflicts among constraints before creating the physical database corresponding to an UML class diagram. We will treat the multiplicity constraints using a mathematical programming technique. The analysis and the detection of invalid sub-schemas will be done using Fourier-Motzkin elimination.