The NM&SC Research Agenda addresses both short and long term issues. Currently, the short term plan includes focuses on training the workforce strategies and identifying industry/academic contacts related to our National Research Agenda.
The Research Agenda also includes efforts to reach out to members of National Congressional subcommittees regarding critical M&S technical/R&D issues. Subcommittees include Armed Services Education and the Workforce, Energy and Commerce, Science, Space, and Technology, Transportation and Infrastructure and the newly formed Science, Space and Technology.
Longer term plans include identifying Tech/R&D areas of convergence among differing domains, continuing the identification of emergent technologies impacted/by M&S.
Early in 2016, a two-day workshop was held in January at the headquarters of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia to work on the development of a research agenda for the M&S community. The workshop specifically focused on the role of M&S in engineering complex systems. Sponsored by NM&SC, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the workshop drew 65 leading researchers from the modeling and simulation community who were selected from over 100 nominations resulting from an open call issued in 2015. The workshop was organized by a steering committee that included Richard Fujimoto (NM&SC and Georgia Tech) who chaired the committee, Steven Cornford (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Christiaan Paredis (National Science Foundation), and Philomena Zimmerman (Office of the Secretary of Defense). A formal report of the workshop proceedings has been published, as is available at this link: http://trainingsystems.org/publications/index.cfm. An Executive Summary is provided on the Research Workshop page.