Preface [From the General Chair & From the Editors]

The 2012 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC) is recognized as the premiere international conference for simulation professionals in discrete and combined discrete-continuous simulation. The conference theme for WSC'12 is "WSC Goes Europe" since-after 43 years-for the first time WSC will take place outside of the US. Over the years, WSC attendees have become more international and it seemed only natural to come to one of their home countries, too. WSC'12 offers again many of the traditional tracks that long-time attendees have grown to expect including introductory tutorials, modeling methodology, manufacturing and the continuation of the MASM (Modeling and Analysis for Semiconductor Manufacturing) conference within WSC'12. In all, the conference features 23 tracks giving us all a wide variety of difficult choices to make on which sessions to attend. This year, most of the tracks will have two track coordinators, one from the US and one from Europe, to reflect the fact that we will have considerably more attendees from Europe than usual. The full proceedings consists of nearly 350 full papers and more than 100 different kind of abstracts with a total of more than 1000 authors. We made only a small number of changes to the submission guidelines this year. We believe that the result is a nice tradeoff between authoring ease and quality of the final product, particularly in the age of electronic reading; we hope that you agree.