10th Birthday celebrations for Journal of Simulation
Welcome to the 10th volume of the Journal of Simulation (JoS), which now occupies a position as one of the established simulation journals. As Simon Taylor, one of the founding editors of the journal would put it, we are ‘dead chuffed’ (very pleased) with how it has turned out.
As we start our 10th year, we are welcoming many new people to the editorial board, who we hope will bring new ideas and enthusiasm for simulation, to keep JoS current, relevant and interesting. Among our new editorial board members, we are really pleased to announce that Barry Nelson, Charles Macal, Russell Cheng, Stewart Robinson and Markus Rabe have recently joined the advisory board, whose aim is to steer the direction of JoS based on their knowledge of the simulation community. A quick calculation suggests that we have nearly three centuries of experience in simulation research and practice in the advisory board, which should help to push us forward.
As part of our 10th volume, we will be publishing articles written by members of the advisory board discussing the future of their particular area of simulation. The first of these comes from Barry Nelson and is included in this issue, with some insights into both the history and the future of analysis methodology, that is how to set inputs and work with outputs to get interesting and statistically valid results from simulation models. As you can read in subsequent pages (CitationNelson, 2016), the article considers how the situation has changed over the past decade so that we now have more scope for storing large quantities of data, much better access to parallel computing, and changing priorities for the outputs of simulation models such that risk analysis has become more important that system optimisation.
The advisory board articles are designed to look to the future and set the direction of simulation research because, as a journal, we want to be at the forefront of the next wave of big ideas in simulation. They could be thought of as an update to the first article published in JoS (CitationTaylor and Robinson, 2006) in which Taylor and Robinson surveyed the JoS editorial board on where discrete event simulation (DES) would go in the subsequent 10 years. While some of the anticipated improvements have come about, for example the more widespread use of distributed simulation, there are plenty of challenges that still need more work, for example real-time simulation.
The journal’s scope has broadened over the previous nine volumes to incorporate agent-based modelling and system dynamics, alongside the journal’s initial focus of DES. This is a result of changing opinions, which see these three simulation methodologies to have more similarities than differences. Our emphasis is still very much on getting a good mix of application-based and theoretical papers so that we appeal to both practitioners and academics.
All that remains for me to say is thank you to the many authors, reviewers, board members and of course readers who have supported JoS over the years. We could not have done it without you and we hope that you continue to support us to ensure the next 10 years will be just as successful.