Re: Systems Engineering (was Re: Open source? -> Need to readsource to model?)

[Benedikt Stefansson]

James Odell wrote:

> Hmmm.  In my experience over the last 20 years of developing small to very
> large-scale systems, I don't find that this has to occur.  In fact, I find
> that the "'domain specialist + programmer' paradigm" works quite
> successfully--if you have a good way of expressing domain specialist's
> requirements to the programmer.  Such languages (usually graphical) do exist
> and are in common use.

I realize that I over-generalized in my  message. There are certainly ways to do
this and literally hundreds of thousands of consultants and companies making
their living every day from applying this process. I work for one such company,
so I should have qualified the statement.

I was thinking about a different setting, the pioneering effort of applying a 
new
set of tools (ABM) to a well known class of problems in a scientific field.

I'm an economist, so  the situation I had in mind was where an older generation
economist gets interested in exploring the ABM paradigm and finds a 
knowledgeable
programmer to work with, hoping to create a full-blown model in a few weeks. It
has seemed to me that the outcome depends heavily on how well the economist
understands the tool box, which was the point of my earlier comment: The person
who knows the most about the problem must also learn to express it in this new
language. Unfortunately this means that these efforts often get stranded.

This is also a matter of resources and incentives, in a business setting more
people are able to spend more time to get the matter solved.

In an academic setting it may be more cost efficient to hire an RA to work on a
traditional research project that actually has a chance of getting published.
This means that the business world not only has the resources, but also is way
ahead in terms of inventing the tools and processes to get the job done. This
development is not happening at the same speed in the academic fields that I'm
familiar with.

> There are literally thousands of people that are developing small to very
> large-scale systems small to very large-scale systems using this approach.
> And there are dozens of languages (mostly graphical) from which to choose.
> Currently, I am working with two agents standards groups to develop a set of
> useful modeling languages for agents and agent-based systems.  These languages
> are being used successfully by people developing medium-scale agent-based
> systems--even as we speak.  So, keep the faith: help is on its way. :-)

I certainly look forward to seeing these fruits of these efforts. Keep us 
posted!

Benedikt


--
Benedikt Stefansson      | address@hidden
CASA, Inc.               | Ph : (505) 988-8807 x101
Santa Fe, NM 87501       | Fax: (505) 988-3440





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