Call for Papers

5th Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Agent-Based Simulations
http://www.padabs.org

August 28-29th, 2019, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, jointly with Euro-Par 2017
http://europar2017.usc.es/


Deadlines

- Workshop papers due: May 5, 2016
- Workshop author notification: June 16, 2016

Organizers

- Vittorio Scarano (Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy), chair
- Gennaro Cordasco (Università degli Studi della Campania, Italy),
- Paul Richmond (University of Sheffield, UK)
- Jonathan Ozik (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
- Carmine Spagnuolo (Università degli Studi di Salerno, Italy)

Program Committee (tentative)

- Maria Chli (Aston University, United Kingdom)
- Claudio Cioffi-Revilla (George Mason University, USA)
- Biagio Cosenza (TU Berlin, Germany)
- Nick Collier (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
- Andrew Evans, (University of Leeds, United Kingdom)
- Nicola Lettieri (Università del Sannio e ISFOL, Italy)
- Sean Luke (George Mason University, USA)
- Michael North (Argonne National Laboratory, USA)
- Mario Paolucci (CNR, Italy)
- Arnold Rosenberg (Northeastern University, USA)
- Daniela Romano (Edge Hill University, UK)
- Flaminio Squazzoni (Università di Brescia, Italy)
- Michela Taufer (University of Delaware, USA)
- Mozhgan Kabiri Chimeh(University of Sheffield, UK)
- Paul Brenner (The University of Notre Dame, USA)
- Przemysław Szufel (Warsaw School of Economics)


Objectives of the Workshop

ABSs are an increasingly popular tool for research and management in
many fields such as ecology, economics, sociology, etc. In some
fields, such as the social sciences, these models are seen as a key
instrument to the generative approach, essential for understanding
complex social phenomena. But also in policy-making, biology, military
simulations, control of mobile robots and economics, the relevance and
effectiveness of ABSs is recently recognized.

The computer science community has responded to the need for platforms
that can help the development and testing of new models in specific
fields by providing tools, libraries and frameworks that speed up and
make massive-scale simulations possible. The key objective of this
Fifth Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Agent-Based Simulations is
to bring together researchers that are interested in getting more
performance out of their simulations, by using synchronized, many-core
simulations (e.g., GPUs), strongly coupled, parallel simulations (e.g.
MPI) and loosely coupled, distributed simulations (distributed
heterogeneous setting) as well as on-demand simulation (cloud
setting).

Several frameworks have been recently developed and are active in this
field. They range from the GPU-many-core approach, to parallel, to
distributed simulation environments. In the first category, you can
find FLAME GPU, that allows also non-GPU specialists to harness the
GPUs performance for real time simulation and visualization. For
tightly-coupled, large computing clusters and supercomputers a very
popular framework is Repast for High Performance Computing (Repast
HPC), a C++-based modeling system. On the distributed side, recent
work on Distributed Mason, allows non-specialists to use heterogeneous
hardware and software in local area networks for enlarging the size
and speeding up the simulation of complex ABS models.

The Program Committee includes the main developers of the three
leading platforms in each of the distributed ABS fields (Repast HPC,
FLAME and MASON/D-MASON) and experts in the field of ABSs.

The workshop will allow presentation of regular papers (25 + 5
minutes). The papers will be presented in the regular format (12 pages
LNCS format) and will be reviewed, anonymously by at least 2 reviewers
of the Program Committee. Acceptance as regular papers will depend
upon scientific value and relevance to the workshop theme.

Special Sessions:

- Panel sessions on the OpenAB initiative (chaired by Paul Richmond,
University of Sheffield, UK)
- M.Sc/PhD Forum (chaired by Jonathan Ozik, Argonne National
Laboratory). The forum will provide an opportunity for M.Sc./Ph.D.
students in the fields of parallel/distributed ABSs to present their
thesis/dissertation research, including work in progress within the
topics of interest for PADABS 2017. To encourage interaction among
the M.Sc./Ph.D. students a full paper collecting the contributions of
the forum will appear in the workshop post-proceedings.

Topics of interest

- Frameworks for parallel/distributed ABSs
- Case studies of ABSs in parallel/distributed settings, with an
emphasis on the technical implementation, architectural choices and
their impact on performances
- Methods and techniques for applications of Deep Learning in
parallel/distributed ABSs
- Data structures for accelerating communication in ABSs
- Benchmark parallel/distributed ABSs
- Debugging parallel/distributed ABSs
- Formal methods and algorithms for ABSs in parallel/distributed models
- Load Balancing algorithms, techniques and frameworks
- Management and deployment of parallel/distributed ABSs
- Visualization of parallel/distributed ABSs
- Parallel/distributed frameworks for Model Exploration and Simulation
Optimization Process
- Open benchmark models contributing towards OpenAB initiative (www.openab.org)

Paper submission

The papers will be presented in the regular format (10 pages LNCS format)
and will be reviewed, anonymously by at least 3 reviewers of the
Program Committee.
Acceptance as regular/short papers will depend upon scientific value,
originality and relevance to the Workshop theme.

Euro-Par Workshops Proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture
Notes for Computer Science series after the Workshops. Submissions and
reviewing will be through EasyChair via
https://easychair.org/my/conference.cgi?a=12822916;conf=europar2017workshops

Contact information

- Vittorio Scarano: vitsca@dia.unisa.it
- Gennaro Cordasco: gennaro.cordasco@unicampania.it
- Paul Richmond: p.richmond@sheffield.ac.uk
- Jonathan Ozik: jozik@anl.gov
- Carmine Spagnuolo: cspagnuolo@unisa.it