2. What is computer modeling?
Computational modeling is the use of computers to reproduce some aspects of the behavior of a real world complex system and to subsequently use the model for making predictions under new, as of yet unobserved, conditions. Computational modeling in science and engineering is typically used in situations where the researcher or engineer is either unable to do physical experiments (e.g. star formation in distant galaxies, or climate predictions), where experiments would be very dangerous and unethical (e.g. crowd control during disasters or human brain surgery experiments) or would be very costly or time consuming (e.g. car crash tests, ecological systems and lab experiments). A computer model typically takes several parameters as input and produces quantitative data as output that can be validated against measurements in the physical system. Once a model has been formulated and implemented it can be run for any number of parameter combinations to explore and quantify a system’s behavior (science) or it can be optimized for a certain outcome (engineering) (Fig. 1). For this reason, models provide a crucial nexus between the scientific method and virtual prototyping.