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Summer of Simulation

John Sokolowski, Umut Durak, Navonil Mustafee, and Andreas Tolk, editors
Publisher: 
Springer
Publication Date: 
2019
Number of Pages: 
278
Format: 
Hardcover
Price: 
159.99
ISBN: 
978-3-030-17163-6
Category: 
Collection
[Reviewed by
Bill Satzer
, on
12/8/2019
]
This volume marks the 50th anniversary of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International’s summer simulation conference. Its goal is “showcasing 50 years of work” by the society. It incorporates a historical perspective of simulation over those fifty years. The main body of the book includes papers that represent significant contributions to modeling and simulation from members of that society.
 
The book’s first part is a look back at the development of simulation over five decades and is represented by summaries of presentations from a panel discussion. The retrospective looks in particular at disease modeling, advances in simulation software, the evolution of the disciplines of modeling and simulation, and the occasionally difficult relationships between the practitioners of simulation and those working in artificial intelligence.
 
The second part of the book consists of papers from fellows of the society who describe aspects of their own work. These range from a general discussion of the interplay of abstraction, formalization, and implementation in modeling and simulation to autobiographical recollections to a profile of research publications from the society’s summer meeting proceedings.
 
The more recent papers that are presented here consider pedestrian modeling and agent-based modeling of financial systems. The pedestrian model uses spatial discrete event modeling and simulation to investigate crowd dynamics in very crowded situations such as concert halls, demonstrations. and public celebrations. One of the papers on financial applications analyzes liquidity mismatch in corporate bond funds. The authors simulate market dynamics that emerge from the behavior of agents in response to factors like interest rate changes. The other financial application addresses the demonetization initiative in India that is attempting to move the economy into cashless modes for financial transactions. This work is empirical and agent-based and attempts to identify levels of personal inconvenience in getting access to cash.
 
Since this book focuses on work done by members of one simulation society, its scope is comparatively narrow. It should not be viewed as a broad history of simulation and modeling over the last half century. What does appear here is largely a set of recollections from one community of practitioners of simulation, and is perhaps a little isolated from what one might consider the larger community of people working in modeling and simulation. 

 

Bill Satzer (bsatzer@gmail.com), now retired from 3M Company, spent most of his career as a mathematician working in industry on a variety of applications ranging from speech recognition and network modeling to optical films and material science. He did his PhD work in dynamical systems and celestial mechanics.
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