The Second SIMS EUROSIM conference on Simulation and Modelling (SIMS EUROSIM 2024) and 65th SIMS conference on Simulation and Modelling (SIMS 2024) were organized in Oulu, Finland. The background of this conference series is in the 65-years history of Scandinavian Simulation Society, SIMS. The first SIMS EUROSIM Conference was organized as a virtual conference in 2021. The SIMS conferences are annual and every third of them is a joint SIMS EUROSIM conference.
The Scandinavian Simulation Society consists of members from five Nordic countries: Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland. The goal of SIMS is to further develop the science and practice of modelling and simulation in all application areas and to be a forum for information interchange between professionals and non-professionals in the Nordic countries. SIMS is a member society of The Federation of European Simulation Societies (EUROSIM) was set up in 1989. The purpose of EUROSIM is to provide a European forum for regional and national simulation societies to promote the advancement of modelling and simulation in industry, research and development. EUROSIM consists of 17 European Simulation Societies. The Scandinavian Simulation Society (SIMS) had the Annual Meetings during the conference. International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) co-sponsored the conference via technical committees:
• TC 3.2. Computational Intelligence in Control
• TC 6.1. Chemical Process Control
• TC 6.2. Mining, Mineral and Metal Processing
• TC 6.3. Power and Energy Systems
• TC 6.4. Fault Detection,Supervision&Safety of Techn.Processes-SAFEPROCESS
The conference program consisted of keynote presentations, regular presentations and a panel discussion. The call for papers resulted in 98 submissions prepared by 337 authors from 25 countries. Submissions were reviewed by six chairs, 26 IPC members and 21 international reviewers. Full articles were selected on the grounds of academic merit and relevance to the conference theme. Each submission had 2-5 reviews and the acceptance rate was 67% for the full articles. The proceedings include 66 articles prepared by 200 authors from 15 countries. The keynotes are included as abstracts. The IFAC conference templates were used for the regular papers.
The conference covered broad aspects of simulation, modelling and optimization in engineering applications. The most active area, energy systems, includes many articles on renewable energy, energy storage and power production. High number of contributions are for the circular economy, where the focus is the CO2 capture and use, in the steel industry, where articles are in thermodynamics and computational methods, and in the automation where advanced process control, parameter estimation, process intensification and optimization are used in various application areas, including also mobile robots, warehouse optimization and oil recovery. Other session topics include water treatment and nature-based solutions, biosystems, fluid flow and heat transfer, transportation, machine learning, and modelling in process analysis and optimization.
Panel discussion was organized on future challenges and possibilities for simulation. The discussion focused on four areas: artificial intelligence, importance of the expert or domain knowledge, requirements of data and use of written or spoken expert data. Discussions emphasized using different forms of expertise together with the data-driven approaches. The audience had time for two questions. The limitations on relying only on expert knowledge was the question. This risk can be avoided by following mixtures of ideas also out of box. This answered the question of why to participate to the next SIMS? SIMS continues to focus on different industrial and environmental applications, modelling and simulation tools and provides strong support for PhD students continue for stimulating process development for model-based automation.
We would like to express our sincere thanks to the keynote speakers, authors, session chairs, members of the program committee and additional reviewers who made this conference such an outstanding success. Finally, we hope that you will find the proceedings to be a valuable resource in your professional, research, and educational activities whether you are a student, academic researcher, or a practising professional.