Modeling and Simulation Overview

Models come in many forms …

• Building blueprint
• Virtual patient
• Artificial chess player
• Inductor specification
• Weather forecast
• Word processor reference manual
• Engine control strategy
• Sustainable development (e.g., Phoenix, AZ)

• Software Modeling (e.g, Unified Modeling Language)
• System Modeling (e.g., continuous and discrete time models)

Models exist for “anything” you can think of

A Definition of Model

“ A Model (M) for a system (S) and an Experiment (E) is anything to which E can be applied in order to answer questions about S ”, from M. Minsky, “Models, Minds, and Machines,” Proceedings of IFIP Congress, pp. 45-49, 1965.

• discrete time
• discrete event
• continuous

M&S Interoperability, Composability & Performance

• Fundamental Premise
• Modeling & Simulation are two distinct, yet complementary, activities. They provide the basis for building distributed simulation models.

• Performance:

• computation
• local to each simulation
• communication
• among multiple simulations
• both computational and communication efficiency issues underlie performance