  We explore the possibility of describing the main transport properties of a
granular gas by means of a model consisting of elastic hard spheres under the
action of a drag force that mimics the inelastic cooling of the granular gas.
Direct Monte Carlo simulations of the Boltzmann equation show a good agreement
between the results for a gas of inelastic hard spheres and those for a gas of
driven elastic hard spheres in the simple shear flow state. This approximate
equivalence between both systems is exploited to extend known kinetic models
for elastic collisions to the inelastic case.
