Toward an Integrative Multimodeling Interface: A Human-Computer Interface Approach to Interrelating Model Structures

Abstract

Among the different sorts of challenges for the modeling and simulation community, two types of challenges face us: challenges that optimize space and time for the computer and challenges that improve the human interface to the modeling and simulation process itself. While these types of challenges are important for the future health of simulation, the author presents a grand challenge of the latter variety, based on an area termed integrative multimodeling. The purpose of integrative multimodeling is to provide a human-computer interaction environment that allows components of different model types to be linked to one another. This study specifies current modeling practices in simulation and proceeds to justify a need for the challenge. It then follows this with two areas: aesthetic computing and the RUBE software framework, which supports customized “notations” for dynamic models constructed using the extensible markup language (XML).