Ecological Model Repositories Revisited: Casting Ecological Model Composition Problems as Dynamic Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Compositional modelling, the predominant knowledge-based approach to automated model construction, takes a scenario describing the constituent interacting components of a domain system and translates it into a useful mathematical model. This paper extends this approach to enable its application to systems that can not be easily described in terms of interacting functional components. In particular, ecological systems are employed to illustrate the ideas. The previously presented informal approach, which casts the compositional modelling problem as a dynamic constraint satisfaction problem, is herein formalised by a set of algorithms. The major purpose of this work is to allow the recent advances in constraints research to benefit automated model construction and hence model-based reasoning at large.