Redundancy in model representation: a blessing or a curse?

With the intent of dispelling the prevailing negative connotations associated with redundancy, we argue that redundancy can effect benefits in model specification as opposed to model execution. Sources of redundancy are classified as accidental or intentional, and several examples are given for each. The comparative benefits and detriments are discussed briefly, and for the most interesting source of redundancy that induced by a modeling methodology, we demonstrate that automated elimination of redundancy can actually improve the execution time. Although the set of models investigated is small, these results are encouraging for researchers in modeling methodologies using automated model diagnosis.

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