Reflections on the Verification and Validation of Computer Simulations

It is common practice in the simulation community to distinguish between verification and validation. Verification is said to be the process of determining the extent to which the solutions generated by the computer simulation model approximate the solutions to the original mathematical model equations. And validation is said to be the process of determining the extent to which a computer simulation model is an adequate representation of a target system. In this presentation I argue that this distinction is not as clean as it is often thought to be. I also argue that this has important implications for how we think about the epistemology of simulation, and the relationship between theories and the world.

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