Yearly report 2001-2002
SCS European Council

 Andre Bargiela, Chair SCS European Council Board
Alexander Verbraeck, Secretary SCS European Council Board

1. The SCS European Council Board

Until May 2002 when elections were held, the European Council Board had the following members:
Dietmar Moeller Chair - was replaced by Andre Bargiela as acting chair

The current members of the SCS European Council after the election in May 2002 are:

Meetings of the SCS European Council Board were held at the ESS'2001 conference in Marseille, France, and at the ESM'2002 conference in Darmstadt, Germany. At both occasions, the meetings were split into two parts: one meeting dealing with general council matters, and one meeting dealing with conference organization. For all four meetings, detailed minutes and action lists are available.

2. Elections for the SCS European Council Board

Elections have been held for the SCS European Council Board. Voting has taken place via a Website in Nottingham using a unique key that enables a person to vote and - before the deadline - change the vote, where the key can not be traced back to the person. 4 persons could be elected from a list of 6.

The 4 elected members of the board are:
Andre Bargiela 26 votes
Yuri Merkuryev 17 votes
Marwan Al-Akaidi 14 votes
Agostino Bruzzone 14 votes

The two candidates not elected are:
Graham Horton 10 votes
Quasim Mehdi 10 votes

Next elections will take place in two years. One of the worrying points is that the list provided by the SCS Office in San Diego looked incomplete, and that the new members who applied for membership at previous conferences were not part of the list of the San Diego office, so they could not vote.

3. 2001/2002 Conferences and Workshops in Europe

One of the major activities of SCS in Europe is organizing conferences. Each year, a European Simulation Multiconference (ESM) is held in June, and a European Simulation Symposium (ESS) is held in October. The conference attendance for both conferences has stabilized around 300 for the sum of both conferences. Competition in Europe is tough. Apart from the ESS and ESM conferences, a yearly Concurrent Engineering conference (called ECEC) and a Telematics and Multimedia conference (called Euromedia) are organized. These efforts might yield new members for SCS on the longer term.

Some more new conference activities have been started in 2000 in Europe, to broaden the influence of SCS and expanding in new areas of importance for science, industry and people, which focus on the competence and excellence of SCS. These new conferences are the Middle East Symposium on Simulation and Modeling (MESM), the International Conference on Simulation in Food and Bio-Industry (FoodSim), Simulation and Games (Game-On), a yearly Agent Based Simulation Symposium, and a Harbor and Maritime Simulation workshop (HMS).

The following conferences have been organized by or sponsored by SCS Europe between July 2001 and July 2002:

· MESM'2002, September 2001, Amman, Jordan (34 participants)
· HMS 2002 - Harbor and Maritime Simulation, Marseille, France (+30 participants)
· ESS'2001, October 2001 in Marseille, France (173 participants)
· Game-On'2002, November 2002, London, UK (34 participants)
· Euromedia'2002 and ECEC'2002, April, 2002, Modena, Italy (101 participants)
· Agent Based Simulation 2002, April 2002, Passau, Germany (40 participants)
· ESM'2002, June 2002, Darmstadt, Germany (136 participants)
· Foodsim'2002, June 2002, Cork, Ireland (+50 participants is the expected number)
· EuroSIW'2002, June 2002, Harrow, UK (+150 participants is the expected number)

Current ESM and ESS conferences follow the following time-schedule:
· Professional Development Seminars or Tutorials on the day before the conference
· Welcome reception on the evening before the conference starts (can be sponsored by a company)
· Opening session on the first conference day, followed by one or two keynote presentations.
· Three slots of five to seven parallel sessions on the first day
· Second day may open with a plenary speaker or several plenary presentations per track
· Three or four slots of five to seven parallel sessions on the second day
· Social event (i.e. conference dinner) on the second night
· Full or half day parallel sessions on the third day, concluded by the closing session of the conference. During the closing session, the best papers of the conference are awarded.
· Several other events are usually planned for the conference participants, but the fee for those events is not included in the conference fee.
· At all conferences, equipment is made available to the conference participants for accessing the Internet: for reading mail, and for browsing the WWW.
· Making available equipment for audiovisual presentations becomes more important at each conference we organize; LCD projectors (beamers) are considered to be standard conference equipment.
· We think about organizing a vendor buffet or exhibition buffet instead of, or in addition to the conference dinner. A buffet encourages more interaction between conference participants, and it allows the poster presenters to comment on their posters. All costs will be covered by the vendor(s) and/or exhibitors.
· Experiments with "partners for projects" sessions are positive. When we can identify groups interested in this, we will try to bring together potential project partners at all our conferences, and give them a room where they can meet.

4. Future conferences in Europe

Future ESS and ESM conferences are planned until 2006, according to the following schedule:

Most of the conferences will be held on University premises, because we usually can get the rooms and other facilities for free or at very low costs. Since the 8th ESS conference in Genoa, Italy in 1996, the ESS conferences are devoted to simulation in industry. We are now carefully shifting this conference towards an event where simulation users, simulation vendors, simulation professionals, and simulation researchers can meet and exchange experiences and results. Most non ESM and ESS conferences are currently planned two years in advance. The current calendar of the other conferences, workshops, and sponsored events looks as follows:

Euromedia & ECEC 2003 Plymouth, UK April 2003
Euromedia & ECEC 2004 TBA April 2004

Agent Based Simulation 2003 Montpellier, France April 2003
Agent Based Simulation 2004 Guildford, UK April 2004

Euro-SIW 2003 (SISO) Stockholm, Sweden June 2003
Euro-SIW 2004 (SISO) TBA June 2004

Middle Eastern Simulation Symposium (MESM) 2003 Amman, Jordan September 2003
Middle Eastern Simulation Symposium (MESM) 2004 Tunis, Tunisia September 2004

Harbour and Maritime Simulation (HMS) 2003 Riga, Latvia October 2003
Harbour and Maritime Simulation (HMS) 2004 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil October 2004

Game-On 2003 London, UK November 2003
Game-On 2004 TBA November 2004

The Middle Eastern Simulation Symposium is an attempt to extend the SCS contacts to the Middle East, and to bring together the researchers working in the field of simulation in the Middle East. The symposium has two major parts: a scientific part with refereed papers and a proceedings, and a part that is focused on forming local chapters in the different countries in the Middle East. These local chapters will be the key contact between SCS and the simulationists in these countries. Prof. Dr. Marwan Al-Akaidi of the University of Leicester, UK (a member of the SCS European Council Board) heads and develops the growth of this conference in the Middle East in a very successful way. After one or two years, this might result in the formation of a Regional Council for the Middle East.

5. ESM and ESS Conference Organization

As of 2002, the ESM and ESS conferences each have fixed conference directors, who are appointed by the SCS European Council Board, and who become a voting member for the SCS European Council Board. The ESM and ESS conference directors are responsible for the selection of new locations of the conferences and for seeking track chairs and minitrack chairs, who can be proposed to the SCS European Council Board, which takes the final decision on appointing track chairs.

Another change is that the ESM and ESS conferences work with track chairs who are appointed for more than one conference. Each track has two chairs, so there is a backup if one of the chairs is very busy or abroad. The fixed track chairs do their work for a number of years, after which they can hand over to other persons. The big advantage of track chairs who function for more than one year is that their knowledge and network can be used for a number of years, so they can receive the benefits of investing in a good track for a number of years. If a track is chaired very bad (i.e. the number of papers is low, or the papers are of poor quality), the conference director can search for a replacement of the track chair.

Each track has a number of so-called minitracks that aim at a special topic within the track. Minitracks have two chairs as well, who are appointed by the conference director after consulting the track chairs. The idea of a minitrack is to bring together enough papers per topic at a conference that two or more sessions can be devoted to that topic, which means that there is a large enough community on that topic at the conference to be of interest to the participants. Minitracks can be changed more often than the tracks, enabling the track chairs to focus on certain new or interesting topics.

Planning of future conferences follows a fixed time schedule, which allows organizers to start working on the conference three years in advance, and which enables them to use the experiences of previous conference organizers as much as possible. As a rough sketch, the schedule is as follows:
· T-3 years: First proposal to the conference board with location proposal, first selection of topics, main organizers, ideas about major budget items, and local organization.
· T-2 years: Contract signed, approved budget, final selection of topics, approval of the Board
· T-1,5 years: Local organization starts, Web pages, First Call for Papers
· T-1 year: Call for Papers at the previous conference in the same series
It can be seen from the conference schedule in section 4, the current planning of ESM and ESS conferences is until 2003, so the 3 year planning cycle is implemented.

There is a written agreement between SCS Europe BVBA and the conference organizers, which clearly shows the responsibilities of each party with respect to the conference budget. Usually, conference organizers make decisions and promises that heavily influence the amount of money spent, but SCS Europe has all the financial risks. After some problems over the budget, an agreement was made that conference organizers can use as a guideline when making decisions that have financial implications. The mutual trust between organizers and the office, however, remains the basis for conference organization in Europe.

The SCS European Council Board meeting held during the ESM'2002 in Darmstadt, has resolved to formalize the relationship between the SCS European Council Board and the BVBA. The rationale for that is that the re-structuring of the European Council operation (with the introduction of ESS and ESM Directors) and the involvement of newly elected European Council Board members who are unaware of unwritten agreements between the BVBA and the European Council, calls for a clarification of mutual responsibilities. The Draft Agreement has already been produced and has prompted constructive input from the Board members. The second draft is now being discussed by the European Council Board members and the BVBA and the final document will be presented to the European Council Board for approval in October 2002.

6. Historic conference attendance

When we look at the conference attendance over the past years, we see that ESM and ESS have stabilized around 140-190 participants each. The number of papers is about the same, probably because the conference is too small for industry to be really interested, and because researchers are only allowed to go to a conference of this size when they have a paper. Furthermore, travel in Europe is expensive. One of the aims with the new conference structure is to break through the 200 participants ceiling and make the conference more interesting as a place to meet others and work on joint activities.

The historic attendance of ESS and ESM are shown in the graph below:

When we look at the number of papers and the number of participants of the true simulation conferences ESM, ESS, MESM, and Agent Based Simulation (so excluding the co-sponsored events and the workshops such as HMS), we see the following picture:

7. The SCS European Publishing House

One another major activity of SCS Europe are printing and publishing its own proceedings, books, and other material in Europe through the SCS European Publishing House. Languages for publication include English, German, and French. Several books, proceedings of a sponsored conference, and a number of dissertations on simulation have been published, and more books and dissertations are planned for the near future. Any author who wants to publish a book on simulation, modeling, or a related field, can submit a proposal to the SCS European Publishing House. The time between submitting the manuscript and finished printing of the books is usually less than three months. All books are high-quality, hard cover books, however, produced for a low price.

The SCS European Publishing House and ASIM, the German speaking simulation society, covering Austria, Germany and Switzerland, have started a joint cooperation together promoting Publications in Simulation together on the basis of "one Publisher to Customer" in Europe. The Chief Editors are elected from SCS (4) and ASIM (3). It is intended to broaden this idea to more European Simulation Societies developing the Publishing House as an European Simulation Federation Publishing House.

8. Bylaws changes

The bylaws of the SCS European Council have been updated to reflect the changes in the SCS bylaws (e.g. the name "Society for Modeling and Simulation International"), and the composition of the SCS European Council Board with fixed directors for the ESM and ESS conferences. Furthermore, the number of consecutive years that a SCS European Council Board member can serve has been limited to stimulate that board members are replaced after a maximum of three terms, so new ideas can be brought to the Council Board more easily.

9. Problems with service to SCS members in Europe

One of the main problems identified during 2001 - 2002 is that the service to SCS members in Europe is below the desired level. This needs to be taken care of urgently. Some of the problems identified are:
- people who apply for membership do not ever hear back from SCS
- procedure for becoming a member can be very long
- often no or slow reaction to requests by e-mail
- old forms are still used for updating membership for European members
- addresses used are often wrong or incomplete
- mailing time of journals to Europe is often more than six months
- Website is lagging behind, and does not show latest status of European events
- Website does not point clearly to SCS Website in Europe for serving our European members

10. Last year's action items

In the list below, the progress on the plans and action items of the European SCS report of last year is shown.

· Elections for regional representative(s)
Has been implemented. Elections have taken place, and we now have started a two-year cycle of elected representatives in the European Council Board.
· Membership in Europe, including SCS membership at European conferences
Has been implemented at Agent Based Simulation 2001, and at ESS 2001. After more than half a year, the new members had not heard back from the SCS Office in San Diego about their newly acquired membership, so we gave up again.
· Information exchange with SCS San Diego office
Still no improvement. In spite of requests, information is becoming available only after a long time, and usually not with the requested quality. Visibility of European activities on the SCS USA Website is still minimal.
· New conference structure; Incentives for good organization of tracks; Use of the conference matrix
Has been implemented with the Conference Directors for ESS and ESM, with the appointment of fixed track chairs, and with the use of minitracks at the ESM and ESS conferences.
· Full electronic submission and administration of conferences
Still needs to be implemented. The plan is to use electronic-only submissions for all conferences starting with ESM'2003 (Nottingham). Either the SCS software system will be used, or a public domain application.

11. Action items for 2002 - 2003

The following action items will be carried out in the 2002-2003 timeframe:
· Better information exchange with SCS San Diego office
As the improvements expected in 2001-2002 were not reached, we need to implement the information exchange in the coming year. Examples are the exchange of mailings and member lists, the integration of the European figures in SCS reporting, and the
· Better service to SCS members in Europe
One of the examples is a faster procedure for becoming a member, e.g. after registering as a new member at a conference. Another item is to get correct information on Europeans in the SCS database, as there are currently wrong addresses, deceased members, etc. in the database. A final item is the quality of service to non USA members. In the past years, this service has been so bad, that SCS lost many members in Europe, although there are many simulation professionals.
· Full electronic submission and administration of conferences
Needs to be implemented as of ESM'2003.
· Attendance of ESM and ESS conferences
We should increase the conference attendance for the ESM and ESS conferences above 200 per conference. The new structure with fixed track chairs and minitracks should help us there.

Andre Bargiela Alexander Verbraeck
Chair SCS European Council Board Secretary SCS European Council Board
June, 2002 June, 2002