Modeling methodologies belongs to the traditional tracks at the Winter Simulation Conference.  As every year, a broad range of different modeling methods will be presented. Thereby, the focus will be on advances of modeling formalisms,   component-based and distributed approaches, and hybrid systems modeling and simulation. Challenging application areas are often propelling advances in modeling methodologies, therefore dedicated tracks in some striving application area will complete our track. The track is organized into the following special and open sessions. So topics of interest include but are not limited to the below listed areas:

• Grid Based Distributed Simulation
  Grid computing has emerged as a computation paradigm offering the ability to harness geographically distributed computing resources for large computational tasks. 

• If you have further questions about this special session, please contact: Richard Fujimoto , Georgia Institute of Technology,  USA.

  At the same time, distributed simulation technologies and standards such as the HLA have evolved to support interoperability among autonomous distributed simulators. The confluence of these technologies offers new synergies each technology by itself cannot achieve. This session will present recent work concerning the exploitation of grid computing techniques to execute distributed simulation applications.
  
  
• Composability of Models and Interoperability of Systems
  Many recent research projects evaluated challenges of composability and interoperability of M&S applications. While interoperability contends with the software- and implementation details of interoperations, composability contends with the conceptual alignment of issues on the modeling level. In other words: interoperability deals with simulation system challenges, composability deals with modeling challenges. Despite success in some areas, the M&S community lacks a cohesive view and understanding of this emerging discipline, which addresses core issues of M&S, like conceptual modeling, validity, reusability and composability.
  

If you have further questions about this special session, please contact: Andreas Tolk , Old Dominion University, USA.

• The session on Composability of Models and Interoperability of Systems will address these issues and targets to collect the recent relevant research results to build a foundation for a common view of the state of the art in this domain.
  
  
• Visualization for Modeling and Simulation
  Information visualization techniques are a valuable means to exploit the phenomenal abilities of human perception to get insight in large amounts of data and information. Modeling and Simulation represents a challenging application domain for these techniques, demanding for highly-interactive approaches and specifically designed solutions.
  This special session aims to bring together experts in information visualization and modeling/simulation. Contributions are encouraged, which
  • Reflect current problems from the field of Modeling and Simulation and discuss the special requirements with respect to data mining and information visualization,

  If you have further questions about this special session, please contact: Heidrun Schumann, University Rostock, Germany

  • Discuss innovative techniques from the field of information visualization and their application to Modeling and Simulation, or
  • Demonstrate Modeling and Simulation applications successfully utilizing information visualization techniques.

• Hybrid Systems Modeling

  The simplest of systems today require multiple modeling domains to accurately represent, evaluate or verify their function and design. Whether it is a small MP3 player, the flight control system of a modern aircraft, or a modern manufacturing plant, the complete model encompasses a number of electromechanical components as well as a number of model abstraction levels and even implementation options. The semantics of these models range from discrete event to continuous time differential equations. These are referred to as hybrid systems or hybrid dynamic systems. There is an ever increasing interest in being able to model larger systems with greater levels of fidelity. This session is concerned with strategies, techniques and issues for modeling hybrid systems. The topics include, but are not limited to,
  

• Strategies for efficiently modeling and verifying multi-domain systems
• Strategies and methods for combined execution engines.
• Event iteration and Zeno behavior.

If you have further questions about this special session, please contact: Giovanni Mancini, Mathworks,USA

• Event-driven modeling and computation.
• Algebraic versus event-driven modeling

• Simulation of Large Scale Networks

  If you have further questions about this special session, please contact: George Riley, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

  Computer simulation is widely used to model telecommunication networks. However, a major impediment in the use of simulation in this domain has been the limited size of networks that one could reasonably model using existing tools. Recent work using parallel discrete event simulation techniques have dramatically increased the scale of networks that can be studied using simulation. This session is devoted to reporting recent results and advances in modeling large-scale networks using parallel simulation.
• Petri Nets
  In diverse applications the model of a system is  not available, however the behavior of the system is known. Behaviour based specification has become an attractive approach  in designing systems. Especially interesting are applications in the synthesis of a system model from a behavior description.
  

  If you have further questions about this session please contact: Helena Szczerbicka, University of Hannover, Germany
  

  This session focuses on Petri nets for model specification. In this context, the most common way of  behavior description are sequences of events which can be mapped into sequences of firings of transitions of a Petri net. Given a behavior description of a system, we  try to answer a question whether this equals  to the set of all executions of a particular Petri net,  moreover we ask  how to construct a Petri net model , which executions result in that behaviour.
• Distributed, Parallel Simulation

  For many years researchers have investigated applications of distributed computing within the context of modeling and simulation. Distributed simulation studies how a models linked together over a network can work together to support decision making and/or training.
  

  If you have further questions about this session please contact: Simon Taylor, Brunel University, UK

  Research into the use of distributed simulation in an industrial setting has greatly increased in recent years and has presented a new set of challenges to distributed simulation (for example the support of COTS simulation packages). This session will present recent advances in the area and new emerging challenges.

• Ecological Modeling & Climate Change
  Models taking into account sustainable development policies and climatic changes are becoming
  precious tools since the majority of scientists now agree with the anthropogenic origin of
  global warming. Modeling strategies studying the impact of carbon dioxide or other warming
  gasses on major ecosystems are expected. Forest and ocean models will be particularly welcome
  as well as high-resolution scenarios and / or scale transfer methodologies.
  

  If you have further questions about this session please contact: David Hill, Blaise Pascal University,  France
  
  
  

  This session will focus on ecological models dealing with climatic changes and exploiting recent
  monitoring techniques.

• March 3, 2007: Deadlines for tutorial proposals
• April 2, 2007: Deadline for regular paper submissions
• May 31, 2007: Deadline for invited papers
• June 4, 2007: Contributors of regular paper submissions will be notified whether their paper has been accepted.
  
• June 25, 2007: Contributors of invited papers will receive feedback.
  
• July 15, 2007: Final papers are due
Please note: Unfortunately, invited papers do not imply any re-imbursement nor that the conference fee will be waived. Also in preparing your manuscript please note that the Winter Simulation is rather critical with respect to a correct formatting of the paper, Accepted and invited papers will be accessible via the online-system of ACM and IEEE. More information on the conference you find at: http://www.wintersim.org.