ABSTRACT
To remain competitive and reduce cost, industry increasingly relies on computational models (Mosterman, 2004). Designing computational models and using numerical simulation is an alternative to building hardware prototypes for testing purposes. Computational modeling (Aberg and Gage, 2004; Breunese et al., 1995; Cellier et al., 1996; Culley and Wallace, 1994) has a number of advantages over traditional engineering methods, such as:
• Computational models tend to be less expensive to produce and easier to modify. • The ease of modification enables answering “what-if” questions by facilitating rapid exploration of
design options, a task that is time consuming and expensive with physical prototypes. Additionally, some experiments require multiple simulations with different parameters which can be performed through Monte Carlo simulations. This is impossible with physical prototypes because these are prohibitively expensive.
