Interactive Schedule Reduction Model (ISRM)

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The standalone ISRM user interface (UI) is a web page structured and styled with HTML and CSS and controlled with JavaScript

Intense human-model interaction through new design methods and tools may improve perception and reduce effort to realize descriptively-complex systems. Applied to system project management, models may help assess alternative system development processes and resource allocations.

Traditional modeling environments do not effectively support a paradigm for collaborative modeling emphasizing model sharing and reuse, massive data generation and storage, and advanced visualizations-areas in which web- based technologies excel. ISRM addresses two challenges to advance collaborative modeling. First, it aims to identify how a browser-based environment can replicate existing features of a SD model. Second, it aims to adapt existing technologies to support sensitivity analyses and advanced visualizations of results.


The ISRM Visualization Service enables users to see and compare the results of multiple runs of the ISRM

The ISRM extends past work to develop an extensible and interactive tool to rapidly analyze the model sensitivity using web-based technologies in two phases. Phase 1 developed a standalone application using a JavaScript library for modeling and simulation (MAS). Performance benchmark results show rapid model executions on consumer hardware and a browser-based user interface provides capabilities similar to commercial modeling tools. Phase 2 extends results to a service-based interface to execute, compose, and query sets of model results. An implementation using the Node.js runtime and MongoDB database service achieves rapid simulation capabilities, able to compute and store 1000-point analysis sets in a few minutes through local or remote model execution. Finally, user interface components demonstrate individual and aggregated data queries to generate diverse visualizations.

Related Files

Grogan, P.T., de Weck, O.L., Ross, A.M., and Rhodes, D.H., "Interactive Models as a System Design Tool: Applications to System Project Management," 13th Conference on Systems Engineering Research, Hoboken, NJ, March 2015. [paper] [briefing]
IMCSE Phase Two Technical Report SERC-2015-TR-048-2, February 2015. [pdf]

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