Modeling and Visualization
William B. Rouse · Productivity Press eBooks · 2022
A methodology is a set of steps for accomplishing something, in our case, designing and evaluating products, services, or policies. Engineering is often taught as a set of models and techniques such as theories of dynamic systems, networks, process flows, decision making, and so forth. A further difficulty is that they have, in effect, already decided the nature of the solution. The construct of “phenomena” is central to this chapter. Problem solving should not begin with the selection of mathematical or computational models but instead should commence with consideration of the phenomena that must be understood to successfully answer the questions that motivated the modeling effort in the first place. Behaviors of elementary particles became phenomena of much scientific interest as the 19th century gave way to the 20th. In particular, visualization of phenomena can assist in identifying the portions of the overall problem that may merit deep computational modeling.