The Epistemology of Physical System Modeling

초록

Modeling and simulation have been typically pursued in isolation. When a model of a complex system is reported in the literature, there is a considerable emphasis on the end result, the model. On the other hand, many works on simulation assume the existence of models, and focus on developing representations and reasoning about the models in the representations. However, not every physical system has its models ready to use for problem-solving tasks and constructing adequate models is not trivial. Choosing a simulation method is also dependent on the kinds of models available, the creation of which in turn depends on the knowledge available and its representation. A model of a physical system is normally created by the person studying the system with considerable time and effort spent. But a hand-crafted model is often error-prone and difficult to modify to solve a similar problem about other physical systems. Our work is motivated by three goals: (1) examining the process of model-building and simulation, as well as the types of knowledge and their representation required to perform the process or to evaluate the process and its results; (2) automating the process of model-building and simulation to reason about moving objects; and (3) making the modeling process as general as possible so that common knowledge can be shared and reused instead of being duplicated.