Preface:

The CoSMoS workshops series has been organised to disseminate best practice in complex systems modelling and simulation, with its genesis in the similarly-named CoSMoS research project, a four year EPSRC funded research project at the Universities of York and Kent in the UK. Funding for the CoSMoS project is now complete, but we have decided to continue running the workshop series as a forum for research examining all aspects of the modelling and simulation of complex systems. To allow authors the space to describe their systems in depth we put no stringent page limit on the submissions.

We are pleased to be running the fifth CoSMoS workshop as a satellite event at the 11th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCUN 2012) at the University of Orleans, France. UCUN explores all aspects of unconventional and natural computation, an area rich in the inherent complexity within systems, providing a natural complement to the issues addressed by the CoSMoS workshop.

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

Andrews et al.

explore the analogy between traditional scientific instruments and simulations used in scientific investigations. They highlight the need to understand the model underpinning a simulation and engineer simulations in a rigorous way to provide open and reproducible science.

Evora et al.

present an approach to improve performance when simulating power grids. Their approach uses asynchronous timing to reduce unnecessary calculations and to allow such calculations to execute at a natural pace.

Garnett

describes how the CoSMoS process has facilitated the transformation of an existing agent-based simulation developed to investigate plant development to one that examines the phenomena of standing ovations in audiences.

Greaves et al.

apply the CoSMoS process to a social-ecological case-study. This domain raises difficult-to-model "soft element" concepts, which have been tackled at the domain modelling stage to help clarify and understand their interactions.

Stepney

provides an overview of a pattern language that has been developed within the CoSMoS project to support the development of scientifically useful and credible simulations. Several pattern and antipattern examples are given.

We also invited authors to submit abstracts for discussion at the workshop. One abstract is presented in the proceedings:

Greaves et al.

explore linking scales in both modelling and visualisation by combining two existing blood clotting simulations to provide immediate visualisation of tissue-scale results to cell-scale changes.

Our thanks go to all the contributors for their hard work in getting these papers, abstracts and posters prepared and revised. All submissions received multiple 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 UCUN 2012 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(CoSMoS12,
  editor = "Susan Stepney and Paul S. Andrews and Mark N. Read",
  title = "Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          Orleans, France, September 2012",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          Orleans, France, September 2012",
  publisher = "Luniver Press",
  year = 2012
)