ESSA organises annual conferences. They continue a series of conferences which go back to 1992 when the first SimSoc conference was held in Guildford, UK, and to the first international conference on computer simulation and the social sciences (ICSS&SS) held in Cortona, Italy, in 1997. Starting in 2014, this conference series was renamed in "Social Simulation Conference".
The Fifth ESSA Conference in Social Simulation was held in Brescia, Italy, on 1-5 September 2008. The invited speaker was Peter Hedstrom (Nuffield College, Oxford, UK). It was co-sponsored by Lucchini Foundation.
The Fourth ESSA Conference in Social Simulation was held in Toulouse, France, on 10-14 September 2007. Invited speakers were Marco Janssen (Arizona State University, USA) and David Hales (University of Bologna, Italy). Proceedings were published as “Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Simulation of Social Phenomena”, ISBN 978-2-9520326-7-4.
The First World Congress on Social Simulation was held in Kyoto, Japan on 21-25 August 2006. It was jointly organised by PAAA (Pacific and Asia), NAACSOS (North America) and ESSA (Europe)
The Third ESSA Conference in Social Simulation was held in Koblenz, Germany on 5-9, September 2005. Pre-proceedings were published as “Representing Social Reality”, ISBN 978-3-934795-33-4. Several papers of this and the two earlier conferences were published in “Social Simulation: Technologies, Advances and New Discoveries“, DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-522.
The Second ESSA Conference in Social Simulation was held in Valladolid, Spain on 16-19, September 2004.
The first ESSA Conference in Social Simulation was held in Groningen, NL on 18-21 September 2003.
