Yearly report 1999-2000
SCS European Council

Prof. Dr.. Dietmar P. F. Möller, Chairman SCS European Council Board
Philippe Geril, SCS Europe BVBA

2. 1999/2000 Conferences and Workshops in Europe

• ESS´99 October ,1999 in Erlangen, Germany (127 participants)
• ECEC´00, April, 2000, Leicester, UK (53 participants)
• Agent Based Simulation, April, 2000, Passau, germany (57 participants)
• Euromedia´00, May, 2000, Antwerp, Belgium (60 participants)
• ESM´00, May, 2000, Gent, Belgium (150 participants)
• MESM´00, August, 2000, Amman, Jordan (43 participants; 21 in 1999)
• Foodsim´00, June, 2000, Nantes, France (82 participants)
• ESS´00, September, 2000, Hamburg, Germany (147 submissions received, additional 25 are late announced)
• Game-on´00, November, London, UK (30 participants is our aim)

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
• Day 2 is 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 confe-rence. During the closing session, the best papers of the conference are awarded. The attendance of the closing session is high (usually 40-60% of the conference participants).
• 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; 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.
• A first experiment with a "partners for projects" session is positive. We will try to bring together potential project partners at all our conferences, and give them a room where they can meet.

Furthermore, an agreement is being set up with SISO and ITEC to start organizing from June 2001, onwards the Euro-SIW of SISO with the technical help of IEEE.

SCS Europe is also profiling itself more and more as a third party conference organiser. This will increase the turnover of SCS Europe and also create new contacts for SCS, which in the long run will be beneficial for the society.

Planning of future conferences follows a fixed time schedule, which allows organizers to start working on the confe-rence 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 3, the current planning of ESM and ESS conferen-ces is until 2003, so the 3 year planning cycle is really implemented.

The so-called "Conference Matrix" is used selecting topics and partitioning topics over conferences. The conference matrix is a breakdown of the number of papers per conference in certain categories since the first Euro-pean SCS conference in 1987. Successful categories and less successful topics can easily be identified.

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 orga-nizers 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. See also the next section for the conference procedures.

During the past years, there have been three types of submissions for the Euro-pean SCS conferences (full papers, extended abstracts, and short papers), and three types of papers that can be presented at conferences (extended papers, regular papers, and short papers). Lately, posters have been added to this list. Full paper submissions could lead to, if accepted, regular (80-90%) or extended (10-20%) papers. Accepted extended abstracts were admitted as regular papers. A small number of papers that were interesting for the participants, but not of high enough quality, were accepted as short papers, published in a separate (photocopied) annex to the proceedings. Regular and extended papers appeared both in the main volume of the proceedings.

As of ESM'99, quality of the papers in the conference proceedings will be enhanced even more. Acceptance of papers for the conference proceedings will be on the basis of full papers only. This means that the referees (minimum 3 per paper) can judge the submissions by examining the full contents of the proposed paper, including the abstract, conclusions, and references. This will hopefully also lead to better comments from the referees to the authors. After the authors have made final changes, and put their papers in the right format, the conference proceedings will consist only of the accepted 8 page full papers.

 6. The SCS European Publishing House

Between SCS European Publishing House and ASIM, the German spea-king simulation society, covering Austria, Germany and Switzerland, a joint cooperation together promoting Publications in Simulation together on the basis "one Publisher to Customer" in Europe has been started. 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.

SCS faces the following problems (or challenges) in Europe during the next few years:

• Competition between SCS and Eurosim. An example is a planned Eurosim congress for 2001 which takes place in June in the same time frame as our ESM conference.
• 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. Cash flow remains a pressing issue, so it is very difficult to increase the office on a structural basis.
• Relations to industry in Europe are still by far too low; only a small per-centage of the conference participants come from industry.
• The ratio between the number of papers per conference and the num-ber of conference participants is 1.1 to 1.2. This is by far too low. Many Europeans from Universities are, however, not allowed participating at a conference without presenting an accepted paper.
• The Publishing House sales need to increase: investments are high, and sales still lag behind; the cooperation with ASIM could help.

Relationship with Eurosim
One meeting of the SCS-Eurosim liaison committee has been held. Several meetings have taken place with Eurosim board members. The co-operation with ASIM (German speaking part of Eurosim -- the largest of the member societies) is very strong. ESS11, ESS12, ESM15, ESM16, and ESS13 will be organized in close co-operation with ASIM. ASIM and UKSIM also sponsored the Manchester ESM13 conference.

Small European office
A second part-time person has now been brought in to alleviate Philippe's work. We are also looking at hiring a part-time accountant so Philippe can concentrate more on the marketing side of things..

Membership in Europe
Small progress: both in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East, several SCS activities have been started. This will certainly lead to more SCS members in these regions. As long as a European council fee is not added to the SCS membership fee, nothing can be done to serve our European members better.

Quality issues
In the section on "quality", several changes than will increase conference quality have been explained. These changes affect both conference organization procedures and paper acceptance management.

The ESS Conferences has been transformed to a "Simulation in Industry" Conference series with a large(r) exhibition and active involvement of industry. Several suggestions for more involvement of industry have been implemented. Other ideas will be implemented in Hamburg during ESS'2000.

Publishing House

Several new titles came out last year. A marketing plan with a strategy to increase sales is still needed, however.

Future Technologies and CD-ROM project

The action items on use of the Web and Internet, publishing conference proceedings on CD-Rom, and more use of the database have been implemented. The installation of a full CD-Rom Internet server for all SCS conferences is delayed, but is still on our action list.

There are many plans for the coming years, which have also been outlined in the separate sections. Some of the plans that have not been mentioned above, and on which we are cur-rently working are:

• Strong co-operation with ASIM for publications
• Joint conference co-operation with ASIM
• New features for exhibitors at our conferences (especially at ESS)
• More information in WWW conference organization handbook
• Publish an electronic newsletter, which is e-mailed to our contacts and which can be viewed on the Web
• Install a "partners for projects" session at each conference and an interactive Web-page on which information on projects and wanted partners can be advertized

 9. Conclusions

Concluding, we will do our best to continue the innovations we have carried through during the past few years. In ASIM, we found a strong partner, with whom we can co-operate in conference and publication acti-vities. New activities will be started in Eastern Europe and in the Middle East. These activities will hopefully turn out to be beneficial for SCS Inter-national as well. Conditions that have to be fulfilled to continue along this path and to reach our long term goals are a structural increase in the European office staff and a European Council membership fee that will enable us to present added value to our SCS members in Europe.

Dietmar P. F. Möller

Chair SCS European Council Board
July 12^th 2000