SIC Semper Simulation — Balancing Simplicity and Complexity in Modeling and Analysis

Determining the level of detail necessary to a modeling effort is fundamental to the discipline. Insufficient detail can limit a model's utility. Likewise, extraneous detail may impact the runtime performance of the model, increase its maintenance burden, impede the model validation process by making the model harder to understand than necessary, or overfit the model to a specific scenario. Intuition suggests that resolving this tension is an intractable challenge that reflects the art of modeling and is without promise for general solution. Most analytic communities accept that a truly rigorous, repeatable, engineering solution to the construction of an arbitrary model is unattainable. But the long history of research in modeling methodology suggests there are useful steps communities can make in that direction. Through the lens of current modeling challenges, practices and methods in several domains, we hope to add to this important discussion at the intersection of philosophy and engineering.