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 seventh CoSMoS workshop as a satellite event at the 14th International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (ALIFE 14), New York, NY, USA. ALIFE is the leading international conference on artificially constructed living systems, a highly interdisciplinary research area rich in complexity, providing a natural complement to the issues addressed by the CoSMoS workshop.

The main session of the workshop is based on four full paper and two extended abstract submissions:

Afshar Dodson et al.

apply the CoSMoS approach to analyse and re-engineer Schelling’s Bounded Neighbourhood Model, highlighting the importance of formalising a model for clarity and reproducibility in simulation studies.

Youssef and Rizk

study node-heterogeneity in complex networks, proposing a new model for generating various types of complex networks by varying model parameters.

Banda et al.

introduce a web-based chemistry simulation framework that provides an intuitive user interface, access to a computational grid and reliable database storage.

Andrews and Stepney

show how the CoSMoS process and patterns can be used to reverse engineer a domain model of an existing simulation, Aevol, from the simulation code and associated research literature.

Leijnen and Dormans

present a case study for designing emergence in games, showing how dynamical feedback loops in game mechanics creates fun and interesting gameplay experiences.

Mavelli et al.

describe a computational platform for studying the role of randomness in a minimal cell model, highlighting how random fluctuations can play an important role in determining timing behaviour.

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 ALIFE 14 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(CoSMoS14,
  editor = "Susan Stepney and Paul S. Andrews",
  title = "Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          New York, NY, USA, July 2014",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2014 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
          New York, NY, USA, July 2014",
  publisher = "Luniver Press",
  year = 2014
)