Model abstraction techniques: an intuitive overview

The hierarchy of models, as a conceptual framework, is a sound idea. The ultimate plan is for models and simulations at the various levels in the hierarchy to be able to be reused and interconnected with models and simulations at other levels in the hierarchy. The idea sterns from their very natural desire to increase the accuracy in these higher-level simulations by incorporating the accuracy of the detailed models. Most efforts to date that have endeavored to increase realism have done so by coupling existing detailed codes; also known as "model integration". A better approach would not involve connecting the detailed code(s) with the aggregate simulation, but rather capturing the essence of the detailed codes into a form compatible with the aggregate simulation (in terms of level of complexity), and connect that version. This is the field of research called Model Abstraction, which promises to dramatically improve large-scale simulation accuracy without cost to execution time.