The objectives of this workshop, being held in Shanghai, China, 23-25 July 2012, are (i) to scope new opportunities and challenges in simulation research related to new emerging computing technologies and application areas, and brainstorm how to successfully approach them; and (ii) to promote simulation research in East Asia and foster international collaborations. New emerging computing technologies bring new paradigms to simulation methodology, changing traditional ways of implementing input modeling, output analysis, and simulation optimization. The new technologies also give enormous opportunities for the simulation community to grow further by expanding application areas and providing fast/efficient/reliable decision support tools for large-scale simulations in the new application areas. The meeting will help define new directions in research and applications of simulation with respect to new computing technologies and emerging application areas.
In contrast to other operations research methodologies, stochastic simulation has been relatively underused outside of North American and Western Europe, due to limited computational resources, as complex large-scale simulation models are computationally intensive. If successful, this workshop will enable and foster long-term cooperation and collaboration on simulation research that will exploit new emerging computing technologies such as parallel and cloud computing and lead to wide use in applications from healthcare to energy to telecommunications to transportation.
This grant partially supported a workshop "2012 NSF Workshop on Simulation Methodology" held in Shanghai during July 23-25, 2012. The purpose of the workshop was to scope new opportunities and challenges in simulation research related to new emerging computing technologies and application areas, and brainstorm how to successfully approach them. Also, the workshop was to promote simulation research in East Asia and foster international collaborations. With new technologies, such as parallel computing, graphic processing units (GPUs), and cloud computing, and emerging areas, such as health systems and environmental systems, there are opportunities for the simulation community to broaden and advance research and applications. Thus, there is a need for identifying new opportunities and challenges in research related to emerging technologies and application areas. More specifically, emerging computing technologies and application areas include Parallel computing environments, GPUs and sensors, Cloud computing, Financial engineering, Healthcare and health system, and Environmental system. Research questions related to the above items, for example, can be How can we effectively use parallel computing environments and GPUs for large-scale simulation or large-scale optimization? How can we effectively use cloud computing for a general simulation model and simulation optimization? How do they affect optimization with high-dimensional decision variables? What are new simulation and input modeling skills that we need in order to take advantages of the new computing technologies? In addition, compared to other areas of operations research, the simulation community is small in China and many other countries in East Asia. The workshop will help promote simulation research attracting more researchers to the field and build international collaborations. There were total 34 participants from various countries including USA, China, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Thailand. Four keynote talks were given and each keynote talks were followed by two short talks. There were also interest group discussions. Four topics were chosen by particpants: Simulation Optimization, Modeling Error, Applications, and New Technology. For each topic, interest groups identified important problems and challenges and approaches. The results will be broadly disseminated through publication in the ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation (TOMACS). A special issue of TOMACS is dedicated to full versions of selected papers with submission deadline in January of 2013. The three co-chairs are serving as guest editors. Total 14 papers are submitted and each article for this special issue was reviewed following the usual high-quality and selective reviewing process of TOMACS. As a result, nine papers are rejected and five papers are currently under revision. A foreword to the special issue will summarize the outcomes of the workshop. The target publication year of the special issue is 2014. The full information about the list of keynote speakers and attendees are posted on the workshop web site which is hosted by Georgia Tech. Invited presentations available from the authors are posted on the web site along with discussion reports. The web address of the workshop is the following: http://www2.isye.gatech.edu/~skim/NSF%20Workshop/.
