Progressive Modeling: The Process, the Principles, and the Applications

Progressive Modeling (PM) is a multidisciplinary forward looking modeling approach that finds pragmatic solutions for many complex and large scale industrial problems. PM brings many innovations to problem analytics, problem modeling, and solution algorithms. PM started as a new approach that incarnates systems thinking in solving industrial problems from optimization perspective to end up with a novel modeling approach that can develop models that address system problems where a group of system problems can be defined, linked, modeled, and solved together. The paper introduces the new modeling paradigm and briefly demonstrates some of its principles and applications. The potential applications of PM include but not limited to the fields of production planning and scheduling, supply chain management, health care management, continuous process improvement, systems optimization, or simply put, any large scale complex system or system of systems.