SIGSIM-PADS '18

An enthusiastic welcome to the 2018 ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS 2018), the 32nd for the PADS series, which this year is held in Rome.

Building on its long successful history, this year the conference attracted high quality submissions on a range of topics on modelling and simulation. In total, forty six (46) submissions were submitted, thirty three (33) as regular papers and thirteen (13) as short papers. Following the rigorous double blind reviewing tradition of PADS, every paper received at least three (3) reviews. All papers and their reviews were then discussed extensively at a Programme Committee meeting that took place on the 2nd of March, 2018. Based on the deliberations of the Programme Committee, fifteen (15) papers were finally accepted as regular papers and eight (8) as short papers. Three (3) regular papers were conditionally accepted and were assigned to three shepherds respectively, who supervised their revision to a successful outcome.

PADS has a long tradition of embracing the work of early career researchers as well as new ideas and cutting edge research which is in progress. A PhD Colloquium and a Poster session will showcase these exciting ideas.

A significant recent development is the participation of PADS in the ACM Reproducibility Initiative. Evaluation of artifact and results replication was handled by a separate Reproducibility Committee. From the originally submitted papers, sixteen (16) regular and five (5) short papers opted for reproducibility evaluation, which is a very encouraging sign and suggests that our community is embracing this important initiative. From the finally accepted papers, five (5) regular and five (5) short have been further evaluated for reproducibility.

Four (4) papers that ranked most highly by the reviewers were nominated for the Best Paper Award and were further considered by a panel to select the best paper for PADS 2018. The nominees, in no particular order, are:

• Fast-Forwarding Agent States to Accelerate Microscopic Traffic Simulations, by Philipp Andelfinger, Yadong Xu, Wentong Cai, David Eckhoff and Alois Knoll
• Comparing Dead Reckoning Algorithms for Distributed Car Simulations, by Youfu Chen and Elvis S. Liu
• Porting Event &Cross-State Synchronization to the Cloud, by Matteo Principe, Tommaso Tocci, Alessandro Pellegrini and Francesco Quaglia
• Simulation Study to Identify the Characteristics of Markov Chain Properties, by Atiqur Rahman and Peter Kemper