Dipartimento di Ingegneria informatica, automatica e gestionale

Welcome to this special issue of ACM TOMACS on the Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS), which is based on selected articles from the 2018 ACM SIGSIM-PADS Conference. This is the flagship conference of the ACM's Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling (SIGSIM), whose 2018 edition was held at the University of Rome La Sapienza, on May 23–25, 2018. This special issue is edited by Georgios Theodoropoulos, Alessandro Pellegrini, and Francesco Quaglia, who served as the conference program and general chairs, and were responsible for the proceedings of the conference. The articles appearing in this special issue have been selected also thanks to the help of Prof. Adelinde Uhrmacher, who acted as the Editor in Chief of ACM TOMACS until August 2019. The outcome of the selection process identified seven articles, top ranked in the review process of PADS 2018, as possible candidates for this special issue. The authors of three of them have been able to meet the deadlines for submitting the substantially extended versions of the original conference articles, while the others were not able to produce sufficiently new results on time to meet the special issue schedule. The submission process for this special issue started in November 2018, and the final decisions for all the involved articles have been made by November 2019, with a very minimal delay with respect to the originally planned schedule. The articles submitted to this special issue and having the organizers of PADS 2018 as authors have been handled directly by Prof. Adelinde Uhrmacher. As an additional mean for keeping the quality of the articles accepted in this special issue at excellent levels, the invited authors had to provide an extension plan of their original conference articles, the adequacy of which has been early assessed by the Guest Editors and by the TOMACS Editor in Chief. Also, a minimum of three reviewers peer reviewed the submitted articles.