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 has now completed, but we have continued to run 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 sixth CoSMoS workshop as a satellite event at the 12th International Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCUN 2013) at the Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy. 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 seven accepted full paper submissions:

Barr et al.

describe an algorithm for efficient simulation of a kind of unconventional computation: quantum random walks on graphs.

Evora et al.

describe an analysis technique applied to the output from a complex Smart Grid system simulation, used to aid the decision making process.

Feher et al.

describe a more abstract approach to transforming Simulink models that should aid model reuse.

Garnett

examines "tipping points", the rapid flipping of a complex system from one quasi-stable state to another, in the context of the banking sector acquisitions and mergers.

Li et al.

use ideas from the CoSMoS approach to repurpose a simulation to apply to a different domain.

Stepney

describes how the ODD protocol can be used to help present CoSMoS simulation experiments in a format that aids their reproducibility.

Tao & Liu

examine self-organisation in complex healthcare systems, using an Autonomy-Oriented Computing approach.

Our thanks go to all the contributors for their hard work in getting these papers 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 2013 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(CoSMoS13,
  editor = "Susan Stepney and Paul S. Andrews",
  title = "Proceedings of the 2013 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          Milan, Italy, July 2013",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2013 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          Milan, Italy, July 2013",
  publisher = "Luniver Press",
  year = 2013
)