Role of Control in the Model Formulation Process

Control is being increasingly recognized as having a critical role in the automation of the model formulation process. This paper describes an approach to understanding this role of control by observing experts' behavior and studying their verbalizations during the process of formulating models. Control concerns were noted at two levels: strategic and tactical. At the strategic level, control behavior was found to be opportunistic, i.e., the modelers did not follow a prespecified approach. This paper focuses on the tactical level, where the emphasis was on scheduling the tasks used to construct the model (referred to as formulation tasks). The tactical controls were demonstrated by our AEROBA system implementation.