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.