ABSTRACT
Introduction In many application domains (military, homeland security, health care, and business), modeling and simulation (M&S) has become a standard approach for systematically developing, testing, and acquiring systems. The use of M&S usually involves three major steps: (1) identifying user requirements to capture stakeholders’ needs, (2) conceptual modeling to capture system’s parts and relationships, and (3) verication and validation (V&V) to evaluate the accuracy, correctness, and credibility of the simulation (Balci 1994; Balci 1998). Although these activities are supported successfully in systems engineering (SE) through standard processes, a formal (in the mathematical sense) process that ties in all SE activities has not been formulated. Further, SE projects that involve both humans and computer systems are very difcult to formulate, track, and validate because computers can only support simplied aspects of a real system
Introduction .................................................................................................... 377 MS-SDF ............................................................................................................ 378
Reference modeling................................................................................... 379 Conceptual modeling ............................................................................... 382
Application example: Building an experimental system to support decision making before sea level rise ooding .......................................... 384
Reference model of sea level rise ............................................................ 385 Conceptual model of the effects of sea level rise on an area ............... 389 System implementation ............................................................................ 395
Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 397 References ........................................................................................................ 398
(Zeigler 1976; Balci 1998; Dill 1998; Pace 2004). Tolk et al. (2013) addressed this gap by proposing an M&S system development framework (MS-SDF) that unies SE and M&S processes through model theory. The MS-SDF is a framework for modeling real-world complex system often called problem situations. A problem situation occurs when there are multiple, possibly competing, perspectives on how to deal with a problem or represent a system. The MS-SDF allows for multiple viewpoints of a system to be captured and for a single representation of the system to be specied and tracked. The result is an end-to-end framework that ensures each requirement specied is satised in the conceptual model and the system, and that the requirements, conceptual model, and system are all consistent with one another. Thus, by applying the framework, we can prove that each requirement is always satised, exactly met, and most importantly that there is no emergence in the system. The balance of the chapter is organized as follows: the Section “MS-SDF” introduces the MS-SDF and discusses how it can be applied to develop systems; the Section “Application example: Building an experimental system to support decision making before sea level rise ooding” presents a real-world problem and describes how the MS-SDF is applied to develop a system. The Section “Conclusion” presents recommendations and future work. To avoid confusion, in the balance of this chapter, the term system refers to a system that we develop (the purposeful simplication of a real system) and the term real system refers to the actual system we are attempting to represent.
