New publication “Ideas towards Model Families for Multi-Criteria Decision Support: A COVID-19 Case Study”

In March, we were able to publish an article in the ACM Transactions on Modelling and Computer Simulation. The journal is published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), one of the world’s leading organisations in the field of informatics and computer science.

The article ‘Ideas towards Model Families for Multi-Criteria Decision Support: A COVID-19 Case Study’ deals with the idea of model families as an approach for decision support in complex and long-term projects, in particular using the example of the COVID-19 pandemic in Austria.

Since both the issues and the understanding of the underlying system are constantly changing in the course of such projects, existing models must be regularly revised, expanded or even redesigned. This often leads to ever larger and more complex models that are difficult to maintain and interpret. The article therefore suggests dividing research tasks into smaller, interacting models instead, each of which is focussed on a specific research question.

The aim of the article is to re-evaluate the concept of model families introduced in the 1990s and promote it as a way of thinking when creating decision support frameworks in large research projects.