UNDERSTANDING THE COMPLEXITY OF THE MODEL FORMULATION PROCESS - A PROTOCOL ANALYSIS APPROACH

Formulation of a model involves organization of certain elements of re ality into an abstract structure that exhibits features and characteri stics of the reality. The formulation process is complex, and this pap er explores that complexity by looking at five previously analyzed pro blem situations in the managerial domain. This is done in several step s. First, the existing model formulation support (MFS) architectures a re analyzed using structures-mechanisms-policies (SMP) model to extrac t the characteristic attributes of the model formulation process. It i s then argued that an integration of these attributes into an architec ture, called integrated modeling architecture (IMA), would be useful i n supporting the complexities of the model formulation process. The va lidity of such an architecture is also examined using the verbalizatio n transcripts for the five problems mentioned above. Our protocol anal ysis shows that the IMA attributes can explain the complexities of the model formulation process.