What is modeling?

Logistics Decision Modeling helps professionals and their organizations learn how to control risk and maximize the use of scarce organizational resources. Learners use modeling to analyze a variety of commercial inputs and understand the impact of different scenarios. They become skilled at using proven techniques and standard industry decision-support tools. Corporate decision-making can be more methodical, and better informed.

Modeling is about building representations of things in the ‘real world’ and allowing ideas to be investigated; it is central to all activities in the process for building or creating an artefact of some form or other. In effect, a model is a way of expressing a particular view of an identifiable system of some kind. Models are:

• a means of understanding the problems involved in building something;
• an aid to communication between those involved in the project, especially between the requirements analyst (a development role) and the user, as part of some deliverable;
• a component of the methods used in development activities such as the analysis of the requirements for an artefact and the design of the artefact.

A model is an abstraction, which allows people to concentrate on the essentials of a (complex) problem by keeping out non-essential details. Since there is a limit to how much a person can understand at any one time, we build models to help in activities such as the development of large software systems. For example, developers build different models throughout the development process in order to verify that the eventual software system will meet the requirements.