AEROBA: a blackboard approach to model formulation

Building models for problem solving is a common practice for many disciplines. Model formulation is a complex process. Researchers have in the past approached this process from a variety of angles including planning, model structuring, model integration, model representation and others. In this paper, the authors use observations of expert modelers in an attempt to understand the process. The observations, made in the form of protocol analysis, identified three important facets to this process. These included: formulation tasks, control considerations and the opportunism in the process of formulation. Using these observations, the AEROBA system was constructed using the blackboard paradigm as its basis. Evaluation of AEROBA is accomplished by comparing protocols obtained from the expert modelers with an execution trace of AEROBA