About Proceedings – Winter Simulation Conference

Proceedings – Winter Simulation Conference

Overview

The Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference, usually shortened to the WSC Proceedings, is the annual published record of the Winter Simulation Conference, the longest-running and most widely recognised meeting devoted specifically to computer simulation modelling and analysis. It is a conference proceedings series, not a journal. That distinction matters for every other fact on this page. A journal issues numbered volumes on a continuing editorial programme and is normally judged by journal measures; a proceedings series instead collects the peer-reviewed papers, tutorials, panels and case studies presented at one edition of a conference each year, and its value lies in the breadth, timeliness and archival completeness of that yearly record. Readers who arrive here looking for an impact factor or an article processing charge are therefore looking at the wrong kind of publication, and this profile explains what the series actually is, how it began, who stands behind it, how its papers are selected, and how a researcher can read, cite or contribute to it honestly and effectively.

Simulation, in the sense this conference uses the word, is the practice of building a computational model of a real or proposed system — a factory, a hospital, a supply chain, a transport network, a call centre, a semiconductor fabrication plant, a military operation or a computer network — and then experimenting with that model to understand behaviour that cannot be observed safely, cheaply or quickly in the real system. The Winter Simulation Conference has served that community since the late 1960s, and its proceedings capture the field as it changed: from early work written around the GPSS simulation language, through the growth of discrete-event simulation software and output analysis, to present work on digital twins, simulation optimisation, agent-based modelling, data-driven simulation and the combination of simulation with machine learning. Because each edition is preserved as a whole, a reader can trace a method, an application area or a research group across decades simply by working through successive proceedings volumes.

The conference is held, as its name suggests, in winter, normally in December, and it rotates between cities in North America and, in some years, Europe and Asia. Its programme mixes several kinds of contribution that rarely sit together elsewhere: introductory and advanced tutorials for newcomers and experienced practitioners, fully refereed research papers organised into topical tracks, industrial case studies, poster sessions, a doctoral colloquium for PhD students nearing completion, vendor presentations from simulation software companies, and named lectures and panels that take stock of the field itself. The proceedings preserve the research core of that programme, and for many simulation researchers a WSC paper is a standard, citable step on the way to a later journal article — or a finished archival record in its own right.

About the Conference and the Series

The Winter Simulation Conference is a multi-society conference. No single publisher or single university owns it. Its sponsoring community has historically included the INFORMS Simulation Society (INFORMS-SIM), the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Simulation and Modeling (ACM SIGSIM), the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE), the Society for Computer Simulation International (SCS) and the American Statistical Association, with technical co-sponsorship at various editions from bodies such as IEEE's Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), ASIM in German-speaking Europe and the Operational Research Society in the United Kingdom. The exact sponsor list printed for a given edition should always be checked on that edition's own programme, because technical co-sponsors vary, but the multi-society character has been a defining feature of the meeting for most of its life: the conference belongs to the simulation community as a whole rather than to one professional home within it.

That breadth explains the shape of the proceedings. A typical recent programme is organised into tracks, and track titles are the best short map of what the series publishes. Recent editions have included tracks on analysis methodology, modelling methodology, simulation optimisation, agent-based simulation, hybrid simulation, data science for simulation, healthcare applications, manufacturing applications, logistics, supply chains and transportation, military and national security applications, aviation modelling and analysis, construction and project management, semiconductor manufacturing, environmental and sustainability applications, simulation education, complex and autonomous systems, and introductory and advanced tutorials, alongside case studies, poster sessions and the PhD colloquium. Track lists change as the field changes — the conference's own history notes new tracks added over the years for topics such as simulation education in 2000, agent-based modelling in the mid-2000s, big data in 2014, social and behavioural simulation in 2015 and cyber-physical systems in 2017 — so researchers should treat any track list, including this one, as a snapshot rather than a permanent table of contents.

Two audiences meet in these volumes, and the proceedings are written for both. The first is academic: researchers developing new methodology for building models, generating random inputs, analysing simulation output, estimating uncertainty, optimising simulated systems or validating models against reality. The second is practical: analysts, engineers and managers who use simulation to make decisions about capacity, staffing, layout, scheduling, investment and risk, and who report what worked, what failed and what the numbers meant. The case-study and applications tracks exist precisely so that the second audience is not forced to read the first audience's papers in translation. For a newcomer, the tutorial papers are often the most useful entry point of all, because leading specialists periodically write careful, self-contained introductions to a technique or an application area specifically for this conference.

History

The conference's own historical record, maintained on its official conference pages hosted through INFORMS Meetings, begins in November 1967 with a meeting in New York called the Conference on the Applications of Simulation Using GPSS, chaired by Harold G. Hixson with Julian Reitman as programme chair. A second Conference on the Applications of Simulation followed in December 1968, also in New York, and a third in Los Angeles in December 1969. The 1968 committee published a substantial digest of its conference so that the papers presented would survive as a record, and the third conference's proceedings, at more than five hundred pages, established the basic proceedings format that later editions followed. Sponsorship widened quickly in those first years, drawing in industrial engineering and management science organisations alongside the original computing sponsors — an early sign of the multi-society structure that still defines the event.

The name arrived in 1971, when the meeting was formally titled the 1971 Winter Simulation Conference, described as the fifth Conference on Applications of Simulation. It was held at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in December of that year, and the conference's history records attendance of roughly twelve hundred, believed to be the largest in its history. Through the 1970s the meeting settled into an annual rhythm — San Francisco in 1973, Washington in 1974, Gaithersburg, Maryland in 1976 as the Bicentennial Winter Simulation Conference, then Miami Beach, San Diego and beyond — with attendance figures in the conference's own table typically in the several hundreds. There was no 1972 or 1975 edition in that early sequence, which is why simple arithmetic on edition numbers and calendar years does not always line up for the earliest period, and why careful citations should always give the year and city as printed on the volume itself.

From the 1980s onward the proceedings became a standard library holding in operations research, industrial engineering and computer science. The PhD colloquium, sponsored by the predecessor of INFORMS-SIM, began in the late 1980s and gave doctoral students a dedicated place in the programme. The 1990s and 2000s added the new tracks listed above as simulation spread into healthcare, homeland security, construction, semiconductor manufacturing and computational biology. In 2012 the conference went to Berlin, its first European edition, and it has returned to Europe since, including Gothenburg in 2018 and a Singapore edition in 2022, reflecting how international the author base had become. Throughout those changes the basic bargain of the series stayed the same: submit a full paper, have it refereed, present it in December, and see it preserved in a proceedings volume that libraries and indexing services treat as the conference's permanent record.

Readers researching the early history should use the conference's own history and past-conferences pages, which list each edition's dates, venue, general chair, programme chair and attendance where records survive. Those pages are also a useful corrective to second-hand summaries: they show, for example, how many of the field's best-known figures chaired the conference early in their careers, and how directly the meeting's growth tracked the spread of simulation software from mainframes to personal computers and then to the web.

Publication Details

Type: Conference proceedings series (annual). Serial identifier: ISSN 0891-7736 (print), as recorded for the series in university research portals and library records for individual editions. Individual editions also carry their own ISBNs, which differ by year and by format, so an ISBN copied from one year must never be reused for another. Publisher and distribution: Modern editions are published through IEEE, with papers appearing in IEEE Xplore with digital object identifiers in the 10.1109/WSC pattern; earlier editions were produced by a succession of conference publishers and printers, which is why older volumes look physically different from recent ones. Organiser: The Winter Simulation Conference Board and its sponsoring societies, with conference administration supported through INFORMS Meetings. Language: English. Frequency: One proceedings volume per conference edition, normally annual.

There is no journal impact factor for this series, and none should be quoted for it. Impact factors are calculated for journals in a specific citation index; a conference proceedings series is not assigned one, and any website that attaches a journal-style impact factor to the WSC Proceedings is applying a third-party estimate of its own invention rather than an official measure. The same caution applies to article processing charges. This is not an open-access journal and it does not charge an APC to publish a paper. Authors of accepted papers normally register for the conference — presenting the paper in person is part of the model — and readers access most modern papers through IEEE Xplore, through a library subscription, or through the conference community's own archive, described below. Fees, where they exist, are conference registration fees set edition by edition, not publication charges, and they are not publicly disclosed as a single standing price because they change every year.

On access, the WSC community is better served than most conference audiences. In addition to IEEE Xplore, the INFORMS Simulation Society maintains a WSC archive that links to papers from past conferences, and the conference states that its proceedings have been indexed in the ISI proceedings indexes since 2000. Individual authors also commonly post accepted manuscripts in institutional repositories. Between those routes, a determined reader can usually obtain most modern WSC papers without difficulty, while very old volumes — from the digest era of the late 1960s and the print era that followed — may require a university library, interlibrary loan or a used copy of the printed proceedings.

Editorial and Organising Structure

A proceedings series has no editor-in-chief in the journal sense, and inventing one would be a disservice to readers. Editorial responsibility for each edition rests with that year's conference leadership: a general chair, a programme chair and a team of proceedings and programme editors and track coordinators, whose names are printed in the front matter of the volume and listed on the edition's official pages. Track coordinators recruit reviewers, manage the refereeing of papers in their area and assemble the sessions. Above the yearly team sits the Winter Simulation Conference Board, drawn from the sponsoring societies, which guards continuity, chooses future venues and leadership, and maintains the conference bylaws. Because the leadership rotates, anyone who needs to contact the right person — about a submission, a correction or a past volume — should start from the current edition's official site rather than from names attached to an older edition.

Peer review is a real and consequential part of this structure. Full papers submitted to the refereed tracks are reviewed, and acceptance is competitive rather than automatic; poster and colloquium contributions follow lighter formats described in each year's call for papers. The conference also recognises quality formally: INFORMS-SIM, for example, sponsors a best student paper award connected with the PhD colloquium, judged among final-year doctoral students who both present in the colloquium and have a full paper in a regular track. Awards of that kind are one reason WSC papers are taken seriously in hiring, promotion and tenure files in simulation-adjacent fields, even though the venue is a conference rather than a journal.

Indexing and Abstracting

The conference states on its official past-conferences pages that the WSC Proceedings have been indexed in the ISI Proceedings since 2000 — the proceedings citation indexes now maintained within the Web of Science ecosystem. Modern editions are also distributed through IEEE Xplore, which makes each paper discoverable with its own DOI, and the series is covered by the major engineering and computing discovery services that index IEEE conference content, including Scopus-based listings in which the series appears under its ISSN with coverage across many decades, albeit with gaps in the earliest years that reflect the survival and digitisation of old volumes rather than the quality of those editions. Practical advice follows from this: when you cite a WSC paper, cite the paper — its authors, title, year, city, page numbers and DOI where one exists — and not merely the series name, because indexers record this publication at paper level.

For literature searching, the most efficient routes are the INFORMS Simulation Society's WSC archive for browsing by year, IEEE Xplore for DOI-level searching of modern editions, and a scholarly search engine for tracing citations forward from a known paper. Because simulation terminology has changed over sixty years — GPSS-era vocabulary, for instance, differs sharply from today's digital-twin vocabulary — historians of the field should search older volumes with period terms as well as modern ones.

Submission and Author Guidance

Submissions are made to a specific edition of the conference, through that edition's official submission system, in response to its call for papers; there is no standing journal submission portal and no rolling acceptance. Authors choose a track, follow the edition's page limit and formatting template, and submit a complete paper — WSC is principally a full-paper conference, not an abstract-only meeting — by the deadline the call announces, typically well ahead of the December meeting to allow time for review, revision and programme assembly. Variants exist for different contribution types: the PhD colloquium has its own route for doctoral students close to graduation, poster contributions follow a shorter format, case-study and vendor contributions have their own expectations, and tutorial speakers are largely invited or propose through the tutorial tracks. Every one of those details — deadlines, page limits, templates, whether a contribution is refereed — is edition-specific and must be taken from the current call for papers, never from a previous year's memory or from a third-party conference listing site.

Three habits distinguish successful WSC authors. First, they write for a mixed audience: the method must satisfy specialists, but the problem, the data and the conclusion should be intelligible to a practitioner from another application area. Second, they treat validation, input modelling and output analysis as first-class content rather than boilerplate, because reviewers in this community are trained to look for exactly those things. Third, they plan the relationship between the conference paper and any later journal version honestly from the start, disclosing prior publication as the call requires. Authors should also expect to attend and present: the conference is built around discussion, and the published record assumes a presented paper.

Costs should be described plainly. There is no article processing charge for this proceedings series. The realistic costs of taking part are conference registration, travel and accommodation, set and published by each edition's organisers; any figure quoted without a year attached is not reliable and is therefore not quoted here. Prospective authors with funding questions should consult the current edition's registration page and their own institution, many of which treat WSC as a standard venue for simulation research dissemination.

How to Read and Use This Series

For practitioners, the fastest value in the archive is usually a case study from their own sector — the healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and semiconductor tracks contain decades of documented projects with real constraints, real data problems and honest discussions of implementation. For researchers, the methodology and analysis tracks, together with the periodic advanced tutorials, function as a running survey of the state of the art, and the reference lists of recent tutorial papers are among the best curated bibliographies in the field. For students, the PhD colloquium papers show what a nearly finished simulation doctorate looks like when compressed into a conference paper, which is a genuinely useful model when writing a first submission.

Used critically, the series also teaches the limits of simulation itself. Panel discussions and retrospective pieces preserved in the proceedings return repeatedly to verification and validation, to the danger of over-trusting a model, and to the difference between a model that runs and a model that deserves a decision. A profile of the series would be incomplete without that note, because it is the conference's own recurring theme — and a good reason to read beyond the newest volume.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Proceedings – Winter Simulation Conference a journal? No. It is the annual proceedings series of the Winter Simulation Conference, a conference publication. It has an ISSN, as many proceedings series do, but it is not a journal, does not publish journal issues and is not assigned a journal impact factor.

What is the ISSN of the WSC Proceedings? The print ISSN recorded for the series is 0891-7736. Individual editions additionally carry their own ISBNs, which change every year.

Does the series have an impact factor or an article processing charge? Neither. There is no official impact factor for a proceedings series of this kind, and there is no APC. Accepted authors normally pay conference registration for the edition at which they present; readers access papers through IEEE Xplore, a library, or the community archive maintained through the INFORMS Simulation Society.

When and where is the conference held? Annually, normally in December, rotating between cities — historically mostly in the United States, with editions in Berlin, Gothenburg, Singapore and elsewhere. Dates and venues for a specific edition are announced on the official Winter Simulation Conference pages hosted through INFORMS Meetings.

Who sponsors the conference? A group of professional societies rather than a single owner, historically including INFORMS-SIM, ACM SIGSIM, IISE, SCS and the American Statistical Association, with technical co-sponsors varying by edition. Check the edition in question for its exact sponsor list.

How do I submit a paper? Through the current edition's call for papers and submission system, choosing an appropriate track and following that year's template, page limit and deadline. Full papers are refereed; doctoral students should also look at the PhD colloquium route. Details from earlier editions do not carry over automatically.

Where can I read older WSC papers? Start with the WSC archive maintained by the INFORMS Simulation Society, which links papers by year, and with IEEE Xplore for modern editions. Very early volumes may only be available in print through libraries.

Profile prepared from the conference's official history and past-conference records, sponsor and programme information published through INFORMS Meetings, INFORMS Simulation Society award and archive information, and library and university records for the series' ISSN. Edition-specific facts — deadlines, fees, tracks and leadership — change every year and should be verified against the current edition before acting on them. Marker: DEPTH-BATCH253.