Category: Social

A System Zoo

I just picked up a copy of Hartmut Bossel’s excellent System Zoo 1, which I’d seen years ago in German, but only recently discovered in English. This is the first of a series of books on modeling – it covers simple systems (integration, exponential growth and decay), logistic growth and variants, oscillations and chaos, and some interesting engineering systems (heat flow, gliders searching for thermals). These are high quality models, with units that balance, well-documented by the book. Every one I’ve tried runs in Vensim PLE so they’re great for teaching.

I haven’t had a chance to work my way through the System Zoo 2 (natural systems – climate, ecosystems, resources) and System Zoo 3 (economy, society, development), but I’m pretty confident that they’re equally interesting.

You can get the models for all three books, in English, from the Uni Kassel Center for Environmental Systems Research – it’s now easy to find a .zip archive of the zoo models for the whole series, in Vensim .mdl format, on CESR’s home page: www2.cesr.de/downloads.

To tantalize you, here are some images of model output from Zoo 1. First, a phase map of a bistable oscillator, which was so interesting that I built one with my kids, using legos and neodymium magnets:

Continue reading “A System Zoo”

Urban Dynamics

This is an updated version of Urban Dynamics, the classic by Forrester et al.

John Richardson upgraded the diagrams and cleaned up a few variable names that had typos.

I added some units equivalents and fixed a few variables in order to resolve existing errors. The model is now free of units errors, except for 7 warnings about use of dimensioned inputs to lookups (not uncommon practice, but it would be good to normalize these to suppress the warnings and make the model parameterization more flexible). There are also some runtime warnings about lookup bounds that I have not investigated (take a look – there could be a good paper lurking here).

Behavior is identical to that of the original from the standard Vensim distribution.

Urban Dynamics 2010-06-14.vpm

Urban Dynamics 2010-06-14.mdl

Urban Dynamics 2010-06-14.vmf

Terrorism Dynamics

Contributed by Bruce Skarin

Introduction

This model is the product of my Major Qualifying Project (MQP) for my Bachelors degree in the field of system dynamics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. There were two goals to this project:

1) To develop a model that reasonably simulates the historic attacks by the al-Qaida terrorist network against the United States.

2) To evaluate the usefulness of the model for developing public understanding of the terrorism problem.

The full model and report are available on my website.

Reference Mode

The reference mode for this model was the escalation of attacks linked to al-Qaida against the U.S., as shown below. The data for this chart is available through this Google Document.
Image:Terrorism_Reference_Mode.jpg

Causal View of the Model

Below is the causal diagram of the primary feedback loops in the model.

Image:Terrorism_Causal_Loop.png

Online Story Model

There is an online story version that explains the primary model structure as well as complete iThink and Vensim models on my MQP page.