Ideas About Simulation Conceptual Model Development

he conceptual model for a simulation addresses the simulation’s context, how it will satisfy its requirements, and how its entities and processes will be represented. The conceptual model is key to (1) assessing a simulation’s validity for any situation not explicitly tested and (2) determining the appropriateness of a simulation (or its parts) for reuse or use with other simulations in a distributed simulation. There are no widely accepted approaches for decomposing the representation of the simulation subject into the entities and processes of a simulation’s conceptual model, for abstracting such representation from available information about the subject, or for describing and documenting the simulation’s conceptual model. This article discusses the development of a conceptual model for both unitary and distributed simulations, focusing on approaches that enhance model completeness, consistency, coherence, and correctness. More than a decade of work at APL in this area is represented in the ideas presented here. (Keywords: Conceptual model, Fidelity, Simulation, Validation.)