The 44th Scandinavian Conference on Simulation and Modeling, SIMS 2003 was organised at Mälardalen University in Västerås, Sweden, September 18-19, 2003.

A total of some 70 researchers from 10 countries participated, and 37 papers were presented during the two days conference. Dr. Charlotte Brogren, the new research director for ABB Corporate Research in Vast-eras, and also worldwide R&D manager for the Automation area within ABB Corporate Research, had a keynote speech on where ABB is heading in the area of Optimization and Control. This was followed by a presentation by Dr Hans Georg Zimmermann from Siemens in Munich, who presented the possibilities with using neural networks for many different applications, and what to do to get them stable and robust. Professor Finn Jensen from Aalborg University gave the third keynote speech on the use of Bayesian nets for decision support systems. The keynote presentations fol-lowed a discussion about the future of simulation.

The regular lectures were given in two parallel sessions on

• Simulation systems and general methods
• Industrial applications in Pulp and paper, oil and gas, wastewater treatment and metallurgical industry
• Applications in Energy Engineering
• Non-industrial applications

In the night between the two conference days the participants went on a boat ride at lake Malaren, where the dinner was served.