Ideas towards Model Families for Multi-Criteria Decision Support: A COVID-19 Case Study
本文重新审视了1990年代提出的模型家族理念，主张在大型研究项目中开发一组相互作用的子模型而非单一模型，并以COVID-19危机中的决策支持为例说明其优势。
Continued model-based decision support is associated with particular challenges, especially in long-term projects. Due to the regularly changing questions and the often changing understanding of the underlying system, the models used must be regularly re-evaluated, -modelled and -implemented with respect to changing modelling purpose, system boundaries, and mapped causalities. Usually, this leads to models with continuously growing complexity and volume. In this work, we aim to reevaluate the idea of the model family, dating back to the 1990s, and use it to promote this as a mindset in the creation of decision support frameworks in large research projects. The idea is to generally not develop and enhance a single standalone model, but to divide the research tasks into interacting smaller models which specifically correspond to the research question. This strategy comes with many advantages, which we explain using the example of a family of models for decision support in the COVID-19 crisis and corresponding case studies. We describe the individual models, explain their role within the family, and how they are used—individually and with each other.