The aim of this report of the Working Group on Hadronic Interactions and Air
Shower Simulation is to give an overview of the status of the field,
emphasizing open questions and a comparison of relevant results of the
different experiments. It is shown that an approximate overall understanding of
extensive air showers and the corresponding hadronic interactions has been
reached. The simulations provide a qualitative description of the bulk of the
air shower observables. Discrepancies are however found when the correlation
between measurements of the longitudinal shower profile are compared to that of
the lateral particle distributions at ground. The report concludes with a list
of important problems that should be addressed to make progress in
understanding hadronic interactions and, hence, improve the reliability of air
shower simulations.Comment: Working Group report given at UHECR 2012 Symposium, CERN, Feb. 2012.
Published in EPJ Web of Conferences 53, 01007 (2013