PADS

A warm welcome to SIGSIM PADS'17, the 5th ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation. SIGSIM PADS is the flagship conference of ACM's Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling (SIGSIM). It provides a unique forum for reporting and discussing research results and important topics of interest to the modeling and simulation (M&S) community. The annual PADS conference has a long history dating back to 1985. Over the years PADS has broadened its scope beyond its origins in parallel and distributed simulation and now encompasses virtually all research that lies at the intersection of the computer science and the M&S fields. Built on its strong history, PADS became the ACM SIGSIM's flagship conference and renamed as SIGSIM PADS in 2013. This year is the 5th edition of the conference under its new brand name.

PADS was first held in Singapore in 2006. We are very pleased that after 11 years PADS returns to Singapore under its new brand name. Singapore is a dynamic city rich in contrast and color, where you will find a harmonious blend of culture, cuisine, arts and architecture. With its friendly and welcome people, state-of-the-art infrastructure and spectacular events, Singapore has everything to make your stay a most memorable experience.

This year's SIGSIM PADS received a large number of submissions, further strengthening its status as a leading conference in its area. All papers submitted to the conference were rigorously reviewed with at least 3 reviewers for each paper. We would like to thank the program committee and additional reviewers for their diligent efforts to provide timely, critical reviews and feedback to the authors. The two and half day conference consists of 2 keynote speeches, 2 invited talks, and presentations of 21 full papers and 2 short papers. The first keynote will be given by Dr. Marc-Oliver Gewaltig on "Towards Simulating the Human Brian", and the second keynote will be given by Prof. Young-Jun Son on "An Integrated Human Decision Making Model under Extended Belief-Desire-Intention Framework". We hope that you enjoy this exciting program that we have arranged for you.

There are 8 students participating in this year's Ph.D. Colloquium. They will give brief presentations as well as showing posters concerning their research. Prof. Philip Wilsey will give a keynote presentation for the PhD Colloquium.

In keeping with the PADS tradition, a Best Paper Committee will select the SIGSIM PADS'17 Best Paper Award from the most highly ranked papers by reviewers. The candidates for this year's best paper are (in no particular order):

• Julius Higiro, Meseret Gebre and Dhananjai Rao. "Multi-tier Priority Queues & 2-tier Ladder Queue for Managing Pending Events in Sequential & Optimistic Parallel Simulations"

• Yulin Wu, Xiangting Hou, Wenjun Tan, Zengxiang Li and Wentong Cai. "Efficient Parallel Simulation over Social Contact Network with Skewed Degree Distribution"

• Md Shafiur Rahman, Nael Abu-Ghazaleh and Walid Najjar. "PDES-A: a Parallel Discrete Event Simulation Accelerator for FPGAs"

The Best Paper Award will be announced during the banquet at the conference. On behalf of the SIGSIM PADS'16 Program Chair, we are pleased to report that the winner of the SIGSIM PADS'16 Best Paper was "Automated Memoization for Parameter Studies Implemented in Impure Languages" by Mirko Stoffers, Daniel Schemmel, Oscar Soria Dustmann and Klaus Wehrle.