  Complex system simulation has been playing an irreplaceable role in
understanding, predicting, and controlling diverse complex systems. In the past
few decades, the multi-scale simulation technique has drawn increasing
attention for its remarkable ability to overcome the challenges of complex
system simulation with unknown mechanisms and expensive computational costs. In
this survey, we will systematically review the literature on multi-scale
simulation of complex systems from the perspective of knowledge and data.
Firstly, we will present background knowledge about simulating complex system
simulation and the scales in complex systems. Then, we divide the main
objectives of multi-scale modeling and simulation into five categories by
considering scenarios with clear scale and scenarios with unclear scale,
respectively. After summarizing the general methods for multi-scale simulation
based on the clues of knowledge and data, we introduce the adopted methods to
achieve different objectives. Finally, we introduce the applications of
multi-scale simulation in typical matter systems and social systems.
