First M&SNet Meeting

Arizona Center for Integrative Modeling and Simulation

Tucson, Arizona, USA

December 5, 2003

The M&SNet is a newly established consortium of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International (SCS). The first M&SNet meeting was organized and hosted by the Arizona Center for Integrative Modeling & Simulation (ACIMS) which is one of the founding members of the M&SNet consortium along with the McLeod Institute of Simulation Sciences (MISS) centers in Genoa and Ottawa. Tuncer Oren of the Ottawa Center is the founding director of M&SNet, and was appointed by Sumit Ghosh, the Vice President of Education, after the SCS Board of Directors approved M&SNet in their July 2003 meeting. The aim of the first meeting of M&SNet was to assemble representatives from current member organizations and representatives from prospective modeling and simulation centers in academia, industry, and government. This meeting provided a forum to discuss current and future activities to strengthen and widen the reach and the impact of the SCS.

Bernard Zeigler, the president of the SCS, delivered the opening remarks and described the M&SNet purpose, rationale and relationship with the McLeod Institute of Simulation Sciences and other modeling and simulation centers. One of the main objectives of the M&SNet is to enable collaboration among M&SNet member organizations, for example, by forming teams to write research and education proposals to funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Homeland Defense, and others.

In the first part of the meeting, many of the participants presented their activities on education, research, and development of software to support modeling and simulation (see presentations). Within this theme, alternative mechanisms for membership in the M&SNet were discussed with a view toward enabling wide spread membership of qualified organizations. Also discussed were plans for developing official M&S curricula and degree programs at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Using Memorandum of Understandings (MOUs), the M&SNet can provide a basis through which members can share resources including software, student/faculty exchange, and joint proposal preparation. A concrete case in point is a proposal that is being prepared to the NSF, for a Science and Technology Center in subsurface modeling and simulation. In this proposal, members of the M&SNet may participate as sub-contractors or as a participating center/university to help with research, knowledge dissemination and transfer within the Center and more generally within the M&S community.

The second part of the meeting focused on exploring joint partnerships among members of the M&SNet as well as industry/government affiliates, in part, fueled by the NSF Science and Technology Center proposal. In this round-table brainstorming session, participants identified some research topics related to agent-based modeling and formal methods as well as other aspects of modeling and simulation. For example, they explored and discussed research related to integrating agents, DEVS, and Z for creating large-software-intensive with the complexity of biological systems. Dan Craigen collected and summarized the outcomes of the round table discussions. The outcomes suggest promising synergies between Formal Methods (whose strength is in rigorous logical deduction) and Modeling and Simulation more generally.

Hessam Sarjoughian

December 28, 2003