A meta-theoretic approach to modeling and simulation

We aim at building a methodological framework that integrates various methods and key concepts in a more coherent modeling and simulation architecture. The required flexibility for such a framework can be achieved by modeling the modeling process itself. The essence of this process lies in refining successive abstraction levels, each level into a lower one. The traversal of these abstraction levels, from the highest level (the more abstract) to the lowest one (the more detailed) involves two aspects: (1) system knowledge reside at different levels of a specification hierarchy; (2) many formalisms are often required for knowledge specification. As multi-formalism modeling provides a powerful means to deal with many formalisms, we show that modeling in addition the specification hierarchy provide the means to support many modeling processes. Both means are combined in a common meta-theoretic approach to enhance flexibility of the integrative framework.