QGeNIe includes several simple tools that facilitate model navigation. Each of them is described in detail in other parts of this document. This section lists them in order to expose them and their purpose.

Submodels

Very often, when a model is large, it becomes impossible to navigate through its graph - it may look like a spaghetti of nodes and arcs. Luckily, real world systems and their models tend to exhibit a hierarchical structure (Simon, 1996). There may be several variables that are strongly connected with each other and only weakly connected with the rest of the model. Such may be the case in a business model - purchasing, production, and sales may be three almost autonomous subsystems that can be connected with each other through a small number of links, their inputs and outputs. A decision maker may want to examine each of these subsystems in detail, but may also want to have a global view of the entire business without unnecessary detail. We advise to use submodels whenever a model becomes sufficiently complex.

One problem that a user will experience is navigation between submodels. To aid navigation, QGeNIe allows to traverse the model by right-clicking on small triangles in those nodes that have parents or children in other submodels and locating these.

Tree View and Graph View

Models are typically developed, edited, and viewed in Graph View, which is the program's primary view. Some operations, however, may be more convenient in the Tree View, which offers an alternative to the Graph View. Nodes in the Tree View are listed alphabetically, so finding them may be sometimes easier than locating them on the screen. The Tree View shows the submodel hierarchy and allows for moving nodes between various submodels. The two views work side by side, similarly to a tree view and directory view in Windows.

Model as a document

Following the idea that one of the main goals of a model is documenting the decision making process, QGeNIe supports two constructs that aid documenting the model: text boxes and annotations.

Text boxes allow for adding an arbitrary text to the background of the Graph View window. This text may be useful as a comment explaining the details of the model.

Annotations, which are small yellow stick-it notes, which can be added to nodes and arcs,are useful for explaining function of nodes and arcs between them, or to note down just about anything the user feels is important regarding various model elements.

Text search

Find button and Find choice in the Edit Menu (described in the Graph View section) allows for searching through the model for a text. It searches through all text elements of the model, such as IDs, names, descriptions, annotations, text boxes, and displays a list of elements found. These elements can then be located within the model.

Visualization of strength of relationships

Intuitively, interactions between pairs of variables, denoted by directed arcs, may have different strength. It is often of interest to the modeler to visualize the strength of these interactions. QGeNIe offers a functionality (described in the Strength of influences section) that pictures the strength of interactions by means of arc thickness. This is especially useful in the model building and testing phase. Model builders or experts can verify whether the thickness of arrows corresponds to their intuition. If not, this offers an opportunity to modify the parameters accordingly.

Status Bar and Output windows

Status bar tells about problems: The Status Bar command displays and hides the Status bar. The Status bar is a horizontal bar located at the very bottom of the main QGeNIe window. For more information on the Status Bar, see the Status bar section of QGeNIe workspace.