Preface:

Building on the success of previous CoSMoS workshops, we are pleased to be running the third CoSMoS workshop co-located with the 12th Inter- national Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (Artificial Life XII), in Odense, Denmark. The Artificial Life conference is an especially good fit for the CoSMoS workshop, examining critical properties of living and life-like systems and attracting a broad range of interdisciplinary researchers. The systems examined by these researchers are inherently complex, and various modelling and simulation techniques have become key to exploring and understanding their properties.

The genesis of the CoSMoS workshop is the similarly-named CoSMoS research project, a four year EPSRC funded research project at the Universities of York and Kent. The project aims are stated as:

The project will build capacity in generic modelling tools and simulation techniques for complex systems, to support the modelling, analysis and prediction of complex systems, and to help design and validate complex systems. Drawing on our state-of-the-art expertise in many aspects of computer systems engineering, we will develop CoSMoS, a modelling and simulation process and infrastructure specifically designed to allow complex systems to be explored, analysed, and designed within a uniform framework.

As part of the project, we are running annual workshops, to disseminate best practice in Complex Systems modelling and simulation. To allow authors the space to describe their systems in depth we put no stringent page limit on the submissions.

We are delighted this year to welcome philosopher of science Paul Humphreys , Professor of Philosophy, University of Virginia, USA as our keynote speaker. Humphreys is author of the book Extending Our- selves: Computational Science, Empiricism, and Scientific Method that introduces the concept of computational templates, which form the core of many computational models. Our proceedings start with an extended abstract for Humphreys' keynote that expands on computational templates and asks how the same template can be successfully used on different subject matters.

The main session of the workshop is based on four full paper submissions:

Garnett, Stepney, Day and Leyser describe an example of how to incrementally change a biological simulation (auxin transport canalisation in plants) in a principled manner using the process derived as part of the CoSMoS project.

Ghorbani, Ligtvoet, Nikolic and Dijkema investigate institutional frameworks to analyse socio-technical systems and understand complexity in agent-based models, providing a Kauffman model example.

Polack focusses on arguing validation of simulation in science, proposing the use of validity arguments across many validation approaches to provide evidence that simulations are scientifically fit for purpose.

Stevens presents an adaptation to Gosper's hashlife algorithm for the application to a three-dimensional kinematic environment, by simulating the environment which is modelled using cellular automaton rules.

For the first time at a CoSMoS workshop, we also invited authors to submit abstracts, for presentation in a poster session. Abstracts for the following posters are presented in the proceedings:

Andrews, Ghetiu, Hoverd, Owen, Sampson, Warren and Zamorano provide a group reflection on researching complex systems, providing an overview of general issues that can be both interesting but challenging.

Araujo, Bentley and Baum show how a simulation of chromosome missegregation in cancer therapies can provide new insights into cancer progression.

Jones, d'Inverno and Blackwell present an overview of their work modelling the haematopoetic cellular system, including how adopting an agent-based technique can facilitate a system-level conceptualisation of the domain.

Our thanks go to Paul Humphreys for presenting his keynote and to all the contributors for their hard work in getting these papers, abstracts and posters prepared and revised. All submissions received four reviews, and we thank the programme committee for their prompt, extensive and in-depth reviews. We would also like to extend a special thanks to the organising committee of Artificial Life XII for enabling our workshop to be co-located with this conference. We hope that readers will enjoy this set of papers, and come away with insight on the state of the art, and some understanding of current progress in Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation.

@proceedings(CoSMoS10,
  editor = "Susan Stepney and Peter H. Welch and Paul S. Andrews and Adam T. Sampson",
  title = "Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          Odense, Denmark, August 2010",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          Odense, Denmark, August 2010",
  publisher = "Luniver Press",
  year = 2010
)