Context, Composition, Automation, and Communication: The C²AC Roadmap for Modeling and Simulation

Simulation has become, in many application areas, a sine qua non. Most recently, COVID-19 has underlined the importance of simulation studies and limitations in current practices and methods. We identify four goals of methodological work for addressing these limitations. The first is to provide better support for capturing, representing, and evaluating the context of simulation studies, including research questions, assumptions, requirements, and activities contributing to a simulation study. In addition, the composition of simulation models and other simulation studies’ products must be supported beyond syntactical coherence, including aspects of semantics and purpose, enabling their effective reuse. A higher degree of automating simulation studies will contribute to more systematic, standardized simulation studies and their efficiency. Finally, it is essential to invest increased effort into effectively communicating results and the processes involved in simulation studies to enable their use in research and decision making. These goals are not pursued independently of each other, but they will benefit from and sometimes even rely on advances in other sub-fields. In this article, we explore the basis and interdependencies evident in current research and practice and delineate future research directions based on these considerations.