WSC 2020 Best Contributed Application Paper Award

The paper "Multi-thread State Update Schemes for Microscopic Traffic Simulation" by Wen Jun TAN (NTU), Philipp Andelfinger (NTU), Yadong XU (TUMCREATE Ltd.), Wentong CAI (NTU), Alois Knoll (TUM), and David Eckhoff (TUMCREATE Ltd.) has won the Best Contributed Application Paper Award at the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) 2020.  The conference was held virtually from December 14 to 18, 2020.  WSC recognizes contributed papers of exceptionally high quality and the selection process was rigorous.  Four finalists were selected from about 200 contributed papers based on the reviewers’ and track committee’s recommendation, and an independent panel of three distinguished members of the simulation community selected the winning paper from the set of finalists.

The first author Dr TAN Wen Jun is a Research Fellow working with Professor CAI Wentong at PDCL/SCSE.  The Panel’s citation of the awarded paper is as follows: “This paper systematically explores the effects of different synchronization and agent update methods on the performance of multi-threaded traffic simulations.  Asynchronous and synchronous approaches for updating agent states are compared in terms of locking and conflict resolution requirements and simulation runtime.  The results of experiments are clearly and succinctly summarised, providing actionable evidence on how best pursuing when applying parallel computing techniques to traffic simulations.”

The Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) is the premier international forum for disseminating recent advances in the field of system simulation, with the principal focus being discrete-event simulation and combined discrete-continuous simulation.  In addition to a technical program of unsurpassed scope and quality, WSC provides the central meeting place for simulation practitioners, researchers, and vendors working in all disciplines in industrial, governmental, military, and academic sectors.  This year’s theme of WSC is “Simulation Drives Innovation”.  Simulation allows us to tackle many complex problems we could not otherwise – which, in turn, allows us to innovate!