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.