Modeling and Simulation of Ultra-Large-Scale Systems (MSULSS)

This track offers opportunities to present research of relevance to the modeling and simulation of ultra-large-scale (ULS) socio-technical systems (*). Examples of ULS systems are: the Internet, regional and national power grids, economic markets, and health care infrastructure, providers, payers and users, to name a few.

ULS socio-technical systems present new software engineering challenges in their design, assurance, understanding, and management, not simply because of their scale, but because they include decisionally autonomous elements, that is, entities that have their own goals and means of pursuing those goals. Decisionally autonomous elements have non-uniform responses to stimuli in their environments, such as the influences of other elements and the effects of constraints, such as policies, that guide or restrict their behavior. Humans, as users and participants in ULS systems, are certainly decisionally autonomous, as are human organizations. ULS systems evolve through the collective influence of such elements rather than through the prescription of a central authority. Other technical characteristics of ULSs have been identified as well:

1. decentralized control,
2. inherently conflicting, unknowable, and diverse requirements,
3. continuous evolution and deployment,
4. heterogeneous, inconsistent, and changing elements,
5. erosion of people/system boundaries,
6. inevitability of partial failures; and
7. requiring new paradigms for acquisition and policy.

Given that systems of systems (SoS) share many technical characteristics with ULS systems, papers that present research on smaller SoSs are within the scope of this track, as well.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

• Computational models (validated or partially validated) of ULS systems
• Techniques for simulating ULSSs
• M&S of specific ULS domains such as: large-scale infrastructure, power grids, economic markets, health care, epidemiology, etc.
• M&S of algorithms of control for ULSSs, including but not limited to those from organizational theory, economics, game theory, multi-agent systems, etc.
• M&S of policy as a control mechanism for ULSSs
• M&S of the effects of ULSSs on their environment, and the ensuing feedback loop of the environment on ULSSs
• Theoretical M&S of ULSSs

International Program Committee: to be announced

(*) Northrop, Linda, et al. Ultra-Large-Scale Systems: The Software Challenge of the Future. (ed.) Bill Pollak. Pittsburgh : Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2006. p. 150. 0-9786956-0-7. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/books/0978695607.cfm