Special Issue on Soft Computing for Modeling and Simulation
Authors: Beldjehem Mokhtar ,   Professor, Soft Computing and E-learning Research Laboratory, Sainte-Anne University, Halifax, NS, Canada, Zadeh Lotfi A. , Yager Ronald , Gupta Madan ,   Professor, Berkely Initiative of Soft Computing,    University of California, Berkely, CA, USA,   Professor, Machine Intelligence Institute, Iona College, New Rochelle, NY, USA,   Professor, Intelligent Systems Research Laboratory,    University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
Published: April 2016

Welcome to this special issue on Soft Computing for Modeling and Simulation of the Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics (JACIII). We are pleased to introduce 5 selected papers and 4 regular papers presented at NASTEC (North-American Simulation Technology Conference), which is a series of conferences initiated by Eurosis after in-depth discussions with Prof. Mokhtar Beldjehem and North-American Simulationists, Soft Computing Scientists, addressing issues regarding the interplays and synergies between Modeling, Simulation and Soft Computing. The first NASTEC 2008 was organized at Mc Gill University, Montré{e}al, Canada, which is its birth place. It has attracted Simulationists, researchers and practitioners of Soft Computing, attendees from academic, industry and government agencies in an exchange of ideas and shared experiences. The intent of the NASTEC'2008 event is to nurture the spirit of cooperation and strive to improve the quality of life in this global village through excellence in hybrid Soft Computing research and education by engineering of next-generation intelligent hybrid Soft Computing systems for Modeling, Simulation, Simulation-based and Data-driven Software Engineering, Web-centric Computing, E-learning and Virtual Reality Systems at the service and for the benefits of the humankind. Computer Simulation is being acknowledged as the “third leg” of scientific discovery and analysis, along with theory and experimentation. Simulation Technology aims at building the “software digital factory.” The fields of Modeling, Simulation, and Soft Computing in general have made significant progress; parts of them were reflected in the present Special issue. This issue was able to attract top-level and forefront research. The themes center on novel issues in connection with Modeling, Simulation, Soft Computing, Simulation-based Software Engineering, Web-centric Computing, Virtual Reality Systems, their interplays and synergies. We are grateful to a number of people without whom we would not have been able to put this special issue together. They include our NASTEC'08 IPC and JACIII reviewers for making this special issue possible; they have done an excellent job: We got 4.5 reviews per paper on the average. We are grateful to authors of selected papers who have considered JACIII as the target for their work, and even though we could not accommodate every submission in this issue, we hope that the reviews will be helpful to many people. We are also grateful to Prof. Toshio Fukuda, Nagoya University, and Prof. Kaoru Hirota, Tokyo Institute of Technology, the editors-in-chief, and the NASTEC 2008 conference staff for inviting us to guest-edit this Journal. Last, but not least, we are indebted to the staff of JACIII and Fuji Technology Press for making this a reality.