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This chapter briefly reviews the background of development of modeling and simulation, analyzes the challenges for modeling and simulation from the viewpoint of the whole life cycle of a model, and introduces the concept of model engineering (ME) for simulation. It also proposes a technical system for ME and provides the outline of the whole book and a brief introduction of each chapter.

Credibility is an integrated index to measure whether a simulation model is credible enough to a specific requirement. It is an overview of model accuracy, uncertainty, and performance throughout its whole life cycle following a particular simulation requirement. In this chapter, we present a framework based on a NASA standard to unify the complete process of model credibility measurement. As a significant amount of theories and methods have been proposed to implement VV&A for various models, we mainly focus on how to extract the credibility-relevant characteristics from the life cycle of a model and how to incrementally incorporate the existing methods and historical data to evaluate the credibility of a specific model during its real-time simulation. With the framework proposed in this chapter, both quantitative evaluation result and experts’ scoring are combined to give a hierarchical view on model credibility. Moreover, the credibility evaluation process can be accelerated and made more intelligent using the incremental learning method.