Re: [Swarm-Modelling] newbie question

[Lou Gross]

Folks,
     Just a few comments regarding Paul Johnson's remarks about how to 
be successful at "big" research projects. This is based upon a decade of 
work on managing the software we have developed for the ATLSS project
to provide ecological assessments associated with Everglades restoration
(and along the way, work towards a general methodology for ecological
multimodeling). This is perhaps the largest ecological modeling project
attempted in the recent past. It is of course debatable how "successful" 
we have been, but if we have been, it is because we did not try to do it 
all at once. I have a whole talk I give on Lessons from ATLSS, and two 
key points are:

**Don't try to do it all at once - start small - but have a long-term plan 
for what you wish to include overall, given time and funding.

**Leave room for multiple approaches: don't limit your options.

So although we initially had a whole OO-design for this, we've had to 
build piece-meal around this based not mostly on funding, but on demands
for usable products to meet various agency and Congressional deadlines.
If we hadn't thought carefully about extensibility right at the start,
we'd never have been able to get the models done to provide the scientific
basis for public policy decisions that was needed (and still is). But 
we certainly did not do what Paul suggests (have a plan for modules that
get done along the way as funding arrives), but something much more fluid
as demands, and particularly data availability, changed. In ecology,
this is just one part of "adaptive management".
    Cheers,
         Lou Gross
Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
    and Mathematics
Director, The Institute for Environmental Modeling
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
President, Society for Mathematical Biology (www.smb.org)
address@hidden
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/~gross/
http://atlss.org/ (ATLSS Project Home Page)
http://www.tiem.utk.edu/bioed/ (Quantitative Life Sciences Education)