Challenges of teaching modeling and simulation theory to the domain expertsin a blended learning environment

Modeling and Simulation (M&S) engineering is one of the challenging area to cooperate between different fields. Usually, experts in many fields such as domain and M&S experts cooperate with each other to build a complete simulator. However, the cooperation is often difficult due to the security policies in some domains, such as military areas. Therefore, in such domain, the domain experts are required to know about the M&S knowledge to design the simulation models so that they can build the simulation model without violating the security policies. In order to keep the security policy, we described our experience of supporting the domain experts to learn the DEVS formalism using the blended learning concept. From our experiences, we found that the DEVS formalism is intuitive for the modeler to model the real system, and the blended learning is effective to learn the knowledge of new field.