SCS European Council
1. Composition of the European Council Board
In the past year, two major changes to the European Council Board
were made. After the death of Milan Kotva, Yury Merkuryev from
Latvia was added to the Board, especially for Eastern European
relations. In June 1996, Agostino Bruzzone was added to the Board
for industry relations. He is currently organizing the 1996 European
Simulation Symposium, which will be the first European simulation
conference dedicated to simulation in industry. The current Board
is composed as follows:
| Name | Country | Task |
| Alexander Verbraeck | Netherlands | chair |
| Ali Riza Kaylan | Turkey | secretary |
| Agostino Bruzzone | Italy | industry contacts |
| Eugene Kerckhoffs | Netherlands | past chairman |
| Axel Lehmann | Germany | membership, SCS contacts |
| Yury Merkuryev | Latvia | Eastern Europe |
| Rainer Rimane | Germany | finance, office relations |
| Dick Zobel | UK | Eurosim relations |
At each European Simulation Multiconference (June) and European
Simulation Symposium (October) a Council Board meeting has been
held, usually the day before or after the conference. The meetings
are usually split into two parts: the Council Board meeting and
the Conference Board meeting. For the latter meeting, general
chairs and program chairs of future conferences are invited, so
exchange of experiences with organizing conferences is stimulated.
The European Council Board has its own mailing list, which is
used to distribute information among the Board members.
2. Conferences in Europe
The major activity 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 is still rising, although Europe has competition from the conferences organized by Eurosim. Between the ESS and ESM conference, a yearly Concurrent Engineering conference (called CEE) and a Telematics and Multimedia conference (called Euromedia) have been organized. It is expected that these fields will benefit largely from simulation and that SCS can bring together researchers and practitioners for these topics by organizing conferences. These efforts might also yield new members for SCS. Figure 1 shows the number of attendants per year for conferences organized by SCS in Europe. The bottom lines show the mean number of attendants per conference. The top two lines the total number of participants and the total number of papers per year.
Figure 1. Number of attendants for SCS conferences in Europe
The separate attendance of the ESM and ESS conferences is shown
in figures 2 and 3.
Figure 2. ESM attendance
Figure 3. ESS attendance
The conference proceedings for the past few conferences have been printed in Turkey under supervision of prof. Ali Riza Kaylan, the secretary and vice-president of the European Council Board. Because of the cost of sending the (1000+ page) books to the conference site, other alternatives are currently being investigated.
At the ESM'95 in Prague (Czech Republic), the ESS'95 in Erlangen
(Germany), and the ESM'96 in Budapest (Hungary), a "Blue
Sky Meeting" has
been organized for SCS Members and others who are interested.
The Blue Sky Meetings were well attended (20-30 participants)
and a number of valuable suggestions and ideas were given by the
participants that will help to improve the service to our members
and to our conference participants. We plan to have a Blue Sky
Meeting at all conferences.
Current ESM and ESS conferences now all follow the same time-schedule:
- Welcome reception on the night before the conference starts
- Opening session on the first conference day, followed by a plenary keynote presentation
- Five to seven parallel sessions on the first day
- Second day may open with a plenary keynote or several keynotes per track
- Five to seven parallel sessions on the second day, concluded by the Blue Sky meeting
- 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. The attendance of the closing session is high.
- Tutorials are given on the afternoon of the third day, or at the day before the conference.
The 1996 ESM conference had a novelty: the entire text of the
proceedings of the conference was available on CD-ROM. Using Adobe
Acrobat (which is available on the CD), all papers of the proceedings
can be searched for keywords, viewed on the screen (including
figures), and printed. Because of the fact that the papers are
stored in facsimile (so not as wordprocessor documents), we experienced
no problems with formulas and figures. The danger that others
copy the content of the papers for their own use is also smaller
than with stored wordprocessor documents. The CD-ROM project has
been managed by Dr. Istvan Molnar of the Budapest University of
Economic Sciences. The University will support the SCS European
Office for future conferences as well.
3. Future conferences in Europe
Future ESS and ESM conferences are planned as follows:
| 1996 | ESM 10 | Budapest, Hungary | 1996 | ESS 8 | Genoa, Italy |
| 1997 | ESM 11 | Istanbul, Turkey | 1997 | ESS 9 | Passau, Germany |
| 1998 | ESM 12 | Warsaw, Poland (or Vienna) | 1998 | ESS 10 | Delft, The Netherlands |
| 1999 | ESM 13 | Nottingham, UK (?) | 1999 | ESS 11 | Marseille, France (?) |
As can be seen from this table, conferences are spread over different
countries (Eastern and Western Europe) as much as possible. For
conference organization, it is always made sure in advance that
the main organizers of the conference are known and that they
are reliable. Most conferences are held on University premises,
because we usually can get the rooms and other facilities for
free or for very low costs.
The ESS conference will be devoted to simulation in industry,
starting with the ESS-8 conference in Genoa, Italy. A special
organization is involved in attracting exhibitors, and the conference
organizers and IPC are composed in such a way that 50% of the
members come from industry.
4. Other European events
In addition to organizing large conferences, SCS Europe supports
local events as well. For the next few years, several smaller
country-based meetings are planned that SCS will support financially
and by organizational effort. In this way, we hope to create an
environment in which local councils and technical councils for
SCS can be formed.
SCS Europe prints and publishes its own proceedings, books, and
other material in Europe through the SCS Publishing House. Several
books on simulation have been published, and more books and dissertations
are planned for the next few years. Financially it is not profitable
yet, but the fact that the name SCS is attached to the publications
is expected to be beneficial for the author(s) and for SCS in
the long run.
Publishing material on the Web and CD-Rom publishing will be a
major point of attention for the next years. After the successful
publication of the Budapest ESM Conference Proceedings on CD-Rom,
it is expected that more publications will follow. We now have
the experience and we can use that to make CD-ROMS that contain
all conference papers on certain topics of the past few years
at low costs.
5. (Potential) problems for SCS Europe
SCS faces the following problems (or challenges) in Europe during the next few years:
- Competition between SCS and Eurosim will increase.
- The European SCS membership is not growing very fast, although the interest in the field of simulation is growing in Europe. The fact that extra members cost money for the European organization (no money comes in for a new member, but he or she gets a smaller fee for attending a conference) does not help increasing the number of members.
- The European office in Ghent is currently too small. The capacity of Philippe Geril is insufficient for the large number of events that are currently organized in Europe.
- Relations to industry in Europe are almost non-existent.
- Most (active) members come from Western European countries. We organize almost half of our conferences in Eastern European countries, but we have to structure the organization of those interested in simulation, taking into account that (travel) money is extremely low.
- The amount of publications of Europeans in SCS journals is
very low, in spite of the fact that very good papers are presented
at European conferences. We still do not know why there is a mismatch
between the growing number of good papers at our conferences,
and a low number of simulation papers being published in international
journals.
6. Issues for the coming years
We see the following issues for the next year:
- Election preparations. Elections for the European Council Board are being prepared for 1997.
- Professionalizing conference organization. A WWW-site for conference organization is almost ready. This can be used by all people involved in the organization of future SCS conferences in Europe.
- Simulation in Industry. The ESS Conferences will be transformed to a "Simulation in Industry" Conference series with a large(r) exhibition and active involvement of industry, both in the preparation of the conference and during the conference.
- Relationship with Eurosim. We are currently waiting for the SCS - Eurosim agreement (signed by SCS) that enables us to work more closely together, and to bring the conferences in line, thereby avoiding similar conferences near each other in time and place.
- (Personal) CD-ROMs. ESM'96
had the first CD-ROM proceedings. ESS'96 and EuroMedia will be
published on CD-Rom as well. Theme CDs and personal CDs will follow.
Alexander Verbraeck
18 June 1996
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