The 61st SIMS conference on Simulation and Modelling (SIMS 2020) was organized as a virtual conference. Originally, this conference was planned to be the first SIMS EUROSIM conference and organized in Oulu, Finland. The COVID-19 pandemic presented tremendous challenges for the global research community and for the entire world. The organizers were first postponing the deadlines and keeping the plan of organizing the conference in person. Since the pandemic was continuing strongly, the plans were changed: the SIMS 2020 was decided to organize as a virtual conference in September 2020 and the first SIMS EUROSIM conference in September 2021.
The conference program consisted of four keynote presentations, a SIMS history review, 70 regular presentations and a panel discussion. The proceedings include 68 full papers. The keynotes and the history review are included as abstracts. The call for papers resulted in 81 submissions prepared by 181 authors from eleven countries. The reviews of all submissions were done by four chairs, eleven IPC members and 37 international reviewers. Full papers were selected on the grounds of academic merit and relevance to the conference theme. Each submission had 2-4 reviews and the acceptance rate was 84% for the full papers published in the proceedings.
The SIMS 61 conference covered broad aspects of simulation, modeling and optimization in engineering applications, including many papers on energy, industry, circular economy, automation and methodologies. Panel discussions were organised on future challenges and possibilities for simulation. The discussion focused on five areas: simulation, energy systems, big data, environment and simulation toolboxes.
All the sessions were held in a virtual conference organized in Zoom. A group of students from the Process Engineering Guild, University of Oulu, were helping the session chairs and co-chairs by taking care of the system operation as session hosts.
Proceedings
The Proceedings has been published by Linköping University Press in Linköping Electronic Conference Proceedings No. 176 :
ISSN: 1650-3686, eISSN: 1650-3740, ISBN 978-91-7929-731-2.