Over the past 25 years, we’ve been fortunate enough to make a mark in all sorts of areas of science and technology. Today I’m excited to announce that we’re in a position to tackle another major area: large-scale systems modeling.

It’s a huge and important area, long central to engineering, and increasingly central to fields like biomedicine. To do it right is also incredibly algorithmically demanding. But the exciting thing is that now we’ve finally assembled the technology stack that we need to do it—and we’re able to begin the process of making large-scale systems modeling an integrated core feature of Mathematica, accessible to a very broad range of users.

Lots of remarkable things will become possible. Using the methodology we’ve developed for Wolfram|Alpha, we’ll be curating not only data about systems and their components, but also complete dynamic models. Then we’ll have the tools to easily assemble models of almost arbitrary complexity—and to put them into algorithmic form so that they can be simulated, optimized, validated, visualized or manipulated by anything across the Mathematica system.

And then we’ll also be able to inject large-scale models into the Wolfram|Alpha system, and all its deployment channels.

So what does this mean? Here’s an example. Imagine that there’s a model for a new kind of car engine—probably involving thousands of individual components. The model is running in Mathematica, inside a Wolfram|Alpha server. Now imagine someone out in the field with a smartphone, wondering what will happen if they do a particular thing with an engine.

Well, with the technology we’re building, they should be able to just type (or say) into an app: “Compare the frequency spectrum for the crankshaft in gears 1 and 5”. Back on the server, Wolfram|Alpha technology will convert the natural language into a definite symbolic query. Then in Mathematica the model will be simulated and analyzed, and the results—quantitative, visual or otherwise—will be sent back to the user. Like a much more elaborate and customized version of what Wolfram|Alpha would do today with a question about a satellite position or a tide.

OK. So what needs to happen to make all this stuff possible? To begin with, how can Mathematica even represent something like a car—with all its various physical components, moving and running and acting on each other?
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