“The fundamental nature of modeling and simulation is to represent something that’s in the world out there in a way that you can manipulate and think about without risk and at low cost,” said Bill Waite, chairman of the AEgis Technologies Group, a Huntsville, Ala.,company that creates simulations for various military and civilian applications.

“It almost doesn’t matter what kind of world you care about; you can use simulations,” Mr. Waite explained. “If you’re a defense agency, you want to create a simulation that will allow a missile that gets built to fly up to an enemy something-or-other and detonate. The same tools and same set of skills are used in the pharmaceutical industry to figure out how the little beads in a Bufferin are going to get from your stomach to your brain.”