Representations over diagrams of categories and abelian model structures

In this paper we systematically consider representations over diagrams of abelian categories, which unify quite a few notions appearing widely in literature such as representations of categories, sheaves of modules over categories equipped with Grothendieck topologies, representations of species, etc. Since a diagram of abelian categories is a family of abelian categories glued by an index category, the central theme of our work is to determine whether local properties shared by each abelian category can be amalgamated to the corresponding global properties of the representation category. Specifically, we investigate the structure of representation categories, describe important functors and adjunction relations between them, characterize special homological objects, and construct various abelian model structures.