Computer Science Methods for Effective and Sustainable Simulation Studies

Motivation

Simulation becomes more and more important in application areas, establishing itself as the third way of science in addition to theory and (real) experiment. To answer research questions, simulation studies form increasingly intricate processes that intertwine the design and execution of various, often calculation-intensive simulation experiments, the generation and refinement of simulation models, and steps of analysis.

The Dagstuhl Seminar will be dedicated towards addressing central methodological challenges in supporting the conduction of effective and sustainable simulation studies. Thereby, the seminar will focus on problems and solutions related to improving:

• Effectiveness: the usage of resources, including computing infrastructure and data, and the assistance of humans throughout a simulation study.
• Sustainability: continuing a simulation study into the future through support for reusing or building upon its central products, such as simulation model, data, and processes as well as the software used.

The last decades have seen a wide range of methodological developments in computer science that are likely to be instrumental in achieving effective and sustainable simulation studies. However, those efforts are scattered across different computer science fields that include high performance computing, (modeling) language design, operations research, visual analytics, workflows, provenance, machine learning, as well as modeling and simulation.

The seminar aims to bring participants with diverse computer science backgrounds together to enhance the methodological basis for conducting simulation studies. The researchers' expertise in developing methods and applying them in application fields as diverse as cell biological systems, traffic systems, or computer networks, will allow to identify and relate core problems and solutions in conducting simulation studies across specific application fields. As results of the seminar, we expect having identified central challenges relating to effective and sustainable simulation studies, analyzed the state of the art, and gathered potential contributions from the various computer science areas. The seminar hopes to spawn new research directions and collaborations to advance the field of modeling and simulation.