SIMULATION AND REALITY: THE BIG PICTURE

The discipline of modeling and simulation (M&S) is advancing, maturing, and is being used in more and more challenging areas. Appreciation of its comprehensive and integrative view, i.e., its big picture would be very useful for its continued and systematic growth and successful applications. The article starts with a rationale for the needs to see the big picture of M&S and ways to see the big picture. Since M&S is closely related with reality and its representations i.e., models, reality/model dichotomy is clarified. As the core of the article, detailed perceptions of M&S from different perspectives such as: purpose of use, problem to be solved, connectivity of operations, and types of knowledge processing are clarified. Then, three aspects of ways to increase the trustworthiness of M&S are outlined (i.e., validation and verification (V&V), quality assurance (QA), and failure avoidance (FA). The article ends with a discussion of M&S from the perspective of professionalism. Some recommendations or challenges are still open for implementations for the success of M&S.