Text-to-Image Generative AI for Modeling and Simulation: Methods, Opportunities, and Applications
For modeling and simulation practitioners, this tutorial addresses the underexplored potential of text-to-image generation to enhance various M&S tasks, offering practical guidance for adoption.
This tutorial introduces text-to-image generative AI to the modeling and simulation community, demonstrating its potential for tasks such as communicating conceptual models, visualizing simulation outcomes, generating educational materials, and interfacing heterogeneous models in multi-scale simulations. It provides practical workflows and transferable principles for integrating these tools into reproducible local pipelines.
Text-to-image generation is a form of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) that converts textual descriptions into images. Most applications of GenAI in modeling and simulation (M&S) have focused on large language models for documentation, coding, or explanation. By contrast, the potential of image generation remains largely unexplored. This tutorial introduces text-to-image generation to the M&S community and details how it can support several M&S tasks, including communicating conceptual models, visualizing simulation outcomes, generating educational materials, and interfacing heterogeneous models in multi-scale simulations. The tutorial combines conceptual guidance with practical workflows, explaining how modern image generators operate, how prompts and simulation outputs can be translated into visual scenes, and how practitioners can integrate these tools into reproducible local pipelines. By focusing on transferable principles rather than specific tools, the tutorial equips M&S practitioners with the knowledge needed to evaluate, adopt, and adapt text-to-image generation in their simulation workflows.