The Conical Methodology and the evolution of simulation model development

Originating with ideas generated in the mid-1970s, the Conical Methodology (CM) is the oldest procedural approach to simulation model development. This evolutionary overview describes the principles underlying the CM, the environment structured according to these principles, and the capabilities for large complex simulation modeling tasks not provided in textbook descriptions. The CM is an object-oriented, hierarchical specification language that iteratively prescribes object attitudes in a definitional phase that is top-down, followed by a specification phase that is bottom-up. The intent is to develop successive model representations at various levels of abstraction that can be diagnosed for correctness, completeness, consistency, and other characteristics prior to implementation as an executable program. Related or competitive approaches, throughout the evolutionary period are categorized as emanating from: artificial intelligence, mathematical programming, software engineering, conceptual modeling, systems theory, logic-based theory, or graph theory. Work in each category is briefly described.