The simulation community is greatly saddened by the recent untimely loss of one its founders, Norbert Giambiasi and send our condolences to his wife Claudia Frydman who was a long time partner in his TMS/DEVS activities.
Norbert has received the DEUG in Physics and the Maitrise d’électronique-electrotechnique-automatique at the Université des Sciences et Techniques du Languedoc, Montpellier, France (1969), and the DEA degree (1972), Ph.D. (with honors, 1974) and Doctorat d’état (1980) at the same University.
He participated in the foundation of the EERIE in Nimes, France and became Norbert Giambiasi has been a full Professor at the University of Aix-Marseille in 1981. In 1987, he created a new Engineering School and a research laboratory, LERI, in Nîmes, France, where he was the Director of Research and Development. In 1994, he returned to the University of Marseilles where he created a new research team in simulation. In the ‘90s he became the director of the Laboratory of Information and Systems Sciences (LSIS, Marseille), a new laboratory integrated by more than 100 researchers and then a founder of CIFASIS, the Argentinian-French Center for Systems research. He was the Scientific Manager of more than 50 research contracts with E.S Dassault, Thomson, Bull, Siemens, CNET, Esprit, Eureka, Usinor, and others. In recent years, Norbert started a workgroup in France (Versim, Vers une théorie de la simulation – Towards a Simulation Theory) and he organized numerous scientific meetings within this workgroup.
He was the author of over 300 research articles, many of them published in SCS conferences and Journals. In his long career, he supervised more than 40 PhD students who will remember him fondly. His former students and colleagues will always remember his rare combination of intellectual rigor and sharp humor, which transpired to his students.
Norbert will long be remembered for fundamental contributions that he made to the fundamentals of fault simulation and as the inventor of Generalized DEVS. His legacy will be secure in persistence in the future through his many graduate students and colleagues, many of whom are themselves outstanding contributing members of TMS/DEVS and the broader, modeling and simulation communities. He was a great scientist, a talented professor and a good friend and we will keep him and his contributions in our minds and in our hearts.
