The process life cycle is a well established concept, having increasingly become a corporate and regulatory imperative. Motivated by a history of major commercial, environmental and societal failures or disasters, the product and process life cycle is underscored by the application of risk management principles. Decision making, driven principally by considerations of a wide range of risks provides the context for the modelling that occurs across the life cycle, especially that for product and process. This paper illustrates, analyses and discusses the role of modelling within the multidisciplinary life cycle framework, emphasising the centrality of the process issues and the growing need of the process engineering community to look beyond the confines of process engineering. The paper considers the application of risk management principles to the modelling life cycle, highlighting some of the unfulfilled challenges in this area.