ABSTRACT
Moving from an outline to something of substance is never easy. Visions expressed in words and diagrams offer useful insights, but it is much more useful to have a functioning model that can be used to explore options and implications. Though these representations are similar in some ways, there is a substantial difference. The difference is like reading a comic strip in a newspaper or watching the same character animated in a cartoon. The experiences are immeasurably different. But the effort required to deliver a cartoon movie far exceeds that needed to sketch a comic strip. In the past, this daunting effort has been a major obstacle, hindering the development of simulation models able to help quantify visions. Fortunately, this situation is changing rapidly. New software, better hardware, established design principles, and a wealth of experience contribute to make it relatively easy to move from the grey model discussed in the previous chapter to a fully-fledged simulation model that can be used to explore alternatives. Moving from the static comic to an animated cartoon is what this chapter is about.
