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 eighth CoSMoS workshop as a satellite event at the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2015), York, UK. ECAL, along with its sister conference series 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 five full paper and one extended abstract submissions:

Andrews and Stepney

present a small addition to the CoSMoS pattern language: the Domain Experiment Pattern, which provides additional structure for the Domain Model component in cases where the experimental setup and procedure details are an important aspect of the simulation project.

De'Bell

uses the CoSMoS approach to build the first iteration of a social system hierarchical network model and simulation, targetting community empowerment in the health care domain.

Greaves et al.

present the details of a project using the CoSMoS approach to build a simulation to investigate a new theory for stem cell decision making; the paper structures its presentation using the CoSMoS pattern language.

Hernandez et al.

present the 'action horizon', a new tool for analysing and counteracting destabilising events, to aid the control of complex networks, and demonstrate its action by stabilising the well-known chaotic predator-prey system.

von Mammen et al.

describe how they have integrated the CoSMoS approach in the teaching of their graduate level Interactive Simulation curriculum.

Williams et al.

provide an extended abstract outlining a Platform Model of a complex immune system signalling pathway, using the X-Machine modelling 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 thanks to the organising committee of ECAL 2015 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(CoSMoS15,
  editor = "Susan Stepney and Paul S. Andrews",
  title = "Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
           York, UK, July 2015",
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Complex Systems Modelling and Simulation,
           York, UK, July 2015",
  publisher = "Luniver Press",
  year = 2015
)