Towards an encyclopedia of Modeling and Simulation methodology

Modeling and Simulation is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. While this provides great benefits to the discipline, it poses great challenges in that 1) the body of knowledge is often dispersed in application areas and 2) each application area develops and uses methods that are seemingly unconnected with one another and are difficult to relate into a cohesive body of knowledge. In this paper, we propose the creation of an encyclopedia of Modeling and Simulation methodologies in order to address these challenges. We survey the structure of several encyclopedias and propose a taxonomical structure and tentative content for the book. We present the characteristics that such a book should have and discuss the potential benefits and areas of growth.