IEEE/ACM DS-RT 2014

We are pleased to welcome you to the 18th IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Distributed Simulations and Real Time Applications (DS-RT 2014), held this year in Toulouse (France). Toulouse, know as “La ville rose”, has shown its importance throughout its distinguished history, which spans over 2000 years. Starting as a Roman settlement, its relevance in the region made it a cultural hub for ballet, classical music, and opera. Despite the cultural and historical influences, modern Toulouse is the fourth largest French city with intensive investments on high-tech development of aerospace industry. The city is home of two massive aircraft makers, Airbus and Aérospatiale, and the National Centre for Space Research has been established in Toulouse for over three decades.

DS-RT 2014 is organized to serve as a forum for simulationists from academia, as well as for industry and research labs. The symposium also builds up opportunities for recent research results on Distributed Simulations and Real Time Applications to be displayed. DS-RT 2014 intends to address the increasing overlap between large distributed simulations and real time applications, such as serious gaming, virtual and augmented reality, and collaborative virtual environments.

We expect to have prepared an exciting program this year. We are delighted that Bernard Mattos from Airbus Operations SAS, Toulouse, France has accepted our invitation to give a keynote talk and will speak on “Simulation Platforms in the Development of Aircraft Systems”. We are also very happy that Petra Ahrweiler from European Academy of Technology and Innovation Assessment, Germany has accepted our invitation to give a keynote speech on "Research Policy Modelling".

This year DS-RT has continued to receive a large number of submissions, strengthening its status as a leading symposium in its research area, which seeks to target the growing overlap between large distributed simulations and real time applications. For those interested in the history of DS-RT, the previous events belonging to this series were held in the following order:

1. DiS-RT '97, Eliat, Israel, January 9-10, 1997
2. DiS-RT '98, Montreal, Canada, July 19-20, 1998
3. DiS-RT '99, Greenbelt, Maryland, USA, October 22-23, 1999
4. DS-RT 2000, San Francisco, California, USA, August 24-26, 2000
5. DS-RT 2001, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, August 13-15, 2001
6. DS-RT 2002, Fort Worth, Texas, USA, October 11-13, 2002
7. DS-RT 2003, Delft, Netherlands, October 23-25, 2003
8. DS-RT 2004, Budapest, Hungary, October 21-23, 2004
9. DS-RT 2005, Montréal, Canada, October 10-12, 2005
10. DS-RT 2006, Torremolinos, Malaga, Spain, October 2-4, 2006
11. DS-RT 2007, Chania, Crete Island, Greece, October 22-24, 2007
12. DS-RT 2008, Vancouver, Canada, October 27-29, 2008
13. DS-RT 2009, Singapore, October 25-28, 2009
14. DS-RT 2010, Fairfax, VA, USA, October 17-20, 2010
15. DS-RT 2011, Salford, UK, September 4-7, 2011
16. DS-RT 2012, Dublin, Ireland, October 25-27, 2012
17. DS-RT 2013, Delft, Netherlands, October 30-November1, 2013

In keeping with the DS-RT tradition, a Best Paper Committee (chaired by Pierre Siron with Georgios Theodoropoulos and Robson De Grande as members) will select the DS-RT 2014 Best Paper Award from the most highly ranked papers as determined by reviewers. The candidates for this year’s best paper are (in no particular order):

1. Efficient Neighbor Searching for Agent-based Simulation on GPU
   Xiaosong Li, Wentong Cai, and Stephen John Turner
2. Improving the Performance of the Extreme-scale Simulator
   Christian Engelmann and Thomas Naughton
3. A Control Framework for Model Continuity in JADE
   Libero Nigro and Franco Cicirelli
4. Trace-driven simulation for energy consumption in High Throughput Computing systems
   Matthew Forshaw and Stephen McGough

The Best Paper Award will be announced during the banquet at the conference. On behalf of DS-RT 2013 Program Co-Chairs, we are pleased to report that the winner for the DS-RT 2013 Best Paper was “Distributed Simulation of Heterogeneous and Real-time Systems” by Gilles Lasnier, Janette Cardoso, Pierre Siron, Claire Pagetti, and Patricia Derler. Congratulations!

The Symposium is hosted by ISAE (Institut Supérieur pour l'Aéronautique et l'Espace), a worldwide reference in aerospace higher education programs and research for aerospace engineering. We would thank all the people of ISAE involved in the organization.

We would like also to thank all members of the organizing committee who have contributed in many different ways. We would also like to express our appreciation to all the program committee members and additional reviewers, who have provided high quality reviews of the many submissions. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the work of Lisa O'Connor and the editorial staff at IEEE Computer Society Press in producing these proceedings.

We hope that you enjoy the DS-RT 2014 Symposium and that you have a wonderful time in Toulouse!