Figure 1. Schematic demonstrating the utility and power of
computational modeling approaches in Science and Engineering.
Besides saving costs and time and enabling otherwise impossible
experiments, a model abstracts scientific knowledge from messier,
physical manifestations creating unambiguous, actionable encapsulations
that facilitate reuse and interaction. This in itself is a valuable
trait. How this knowledge is encapsulated depends for a large part on
the operational definitions or, practically speaking, on the format of
the available data, whether the behavior of the system changes
discretely or continuously in time and/or space and the required output
of the model.