On comprehensive and realistic modeling: some ruminations on the what, the how and the why
Harel, D.
Clinical and Investigative Medicine. Medecine Clinique et Experimentale 28(6): 334-337
2005
ISSN/ISBN: 0147-958X PMID: 16450627 Document Number: 588978
This short paper is about comprehensive realistic modeling in general. I am no expert at all on health care or on modeling health-related systems. Rather, I am a computer scientist and, in recent years, have spent time applying some of my work on systems and software engineering to the modeling of biology. Indeed, the examples given in the talk are of two of our group's biological modeling projects. Nevertheless, I invited members of the audience to try to substitute "biology" for "health care" throughout the lecture. All I promised was that this experiment could yield interesting, perhaps thought-provoking, results. Towards the end I posed a "grand challenge" for the health-care modeling community.The lecture emphasizes the two adjectives "comprehensive" and "realistic", as applied to modeling, and the questions it tries to deal with include:center dot What kinds of systems should we model?center dot Why do we want to model?center dot How should we model?center dot When are we done?