Guest Editors' Introduction to Special Issue on the 2012 NSF workshop

The 2012 NSF Workshop on Simulation Methodology took place in the School of Management, Fudan University, Shanghai, China from July 23, 2012 to July 25, 2012. The workshop was sponsored by the National Science Foundation (USA) under Grant Number CMMI-1219403, the School of Management of Fudan University, and the Financial Engineering and Financial Risk Management Branch of the Operational Research Society of China. The theme of the 2012 NSF Workshop was computer simulation: opportunities and challenges. With new technologies, such as parallel computing, graphic processing units (GPUs), and cloud computing, and emerging areas, such as health systems and environmental systems, there are opportunities for the simulation community to broaden and advance research and applications. Thus, there is a need for identifying new opportunities and challenges in research related to emerging technologies and application areas. More specifically, emerging computing technologies and application areas include parallel computing environments, GPU, cloud computing, financial engineering, healthcare and health system, and environmental system, etc. Under this theme, the goal of the meeting was to scope new opportunities and challenges in simulation research related to new emerging computing technologies and application areas, and brainstorm how to successfully approach them. In addition, compared to other areas of operations research, the simulation community is small in China and many other countries in East Asia. The workshop was to promote simulation research attracting more researchers to the field and build international collaborations. The workshop featured four 1-hour plenary talks, complemented by two 30-minute regular presentations followed by discussion sessions. The plenary talks presented were: