ABSTRACT Psychological aspects of equation-based modelling languages like Modelica are under-represented in literature. This does not reflect the growth of the corresponding userbase. In this paper we try to close this gap by tackling the problem from three sides: we conduct expert interviews, we conduct an experiment based on self-reported timings to analyse the effects of inheritance on understandability, and we conduct an online experiment to analyse the effects of model representations on the performance at modelling tasks. The expert interviews suggest that experienced modelling experts tend to develop their models from the top-down, while novices do the opposite. Results from the second experiment indicate that the effect of inheritance on the time to understand a model is both significant and large. The results of the last experiment imply that graphical representations outperform block-diagrams for several metrics. These results open a broad research field on the theory of good modelling practice.

中文翻译：

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基于方程的建模的心理学方面

摘要 基于方程的建模语言（如 Modelica）的心理学方面在文献中的代表性不足。这并不能反映相应用户群的增长。在本文中，我们试图通过从三个方面来解决这个问题来缩小这一差距：我们进行专家访谈，我们进行基于自我报告时间的实验来分析继承对可理解性的影响，我们进行了在线实验来分析模型表示对建模任务性能的影响。专家访谈表明，有经验的建模专家倾向于自上而下地开发他们的模型，而新手则相反。第二个实验的结果表明，继承对理解模型的时间的影响既显着又大。上一个实验的结果意味着图形表示在几个指标上优于框图。这些结果为良好建模实践理论开辟了广阔的研究领域。