The planning of investments for the ports of the North Atlantic range (Hamburg, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Le Havre, Goia Tauro) face a strong growth of the market (double over the next 10 years), large economies of scale, congestion in ports and hinterland connections, and strong competition for parts of the European hinterland. Several investment strategies can be followed. The present strategy has resulted in overcapacity. Modeling allows to trace the dynamic impacts from alternative strategies.
Health care in the Netherlands presents a unique mix of governmental and private responsibilities. Costs for long-term care, expensive treatments and uninsurable care for the complete Dutch population are covered by the Exceptional Medical Expenses Act (AWBZ), administered by 32 regional offices. Every health care provider operates under a contract with the regional administration office. Once contracted services are available, insurers are obliged to reimburse providers for these services even if they are not used by clients. In the coming years part of the Dutch health care will be deregulated and several types of care will be offered under market conditions. Whereas costs for care capacity are at present reimbursed by the government, this situation might change in the future. Regional care offices in general have little insight into long-term developments in supply and demand for health care. This paper describes a system dynamics study on demand and supply for a specific type of nursing care, dementia. The model shows how feedback between waiting lists and volume of different types of demand for care, leads to fluctuations in required capacity. The feared overshoot in long term nursing capacity did not materialize in model runs under a range of environmental scenarios.
Modelling the worldwide nuclear reactor park including all supply chain details, i.e. the nuclear fuel cycle, demands for an integrated nuclear energy system model which also includes feedback loops representing physical feedbacks within the system as well as, and most prominently, socio-political feedbacks in the decision-making on the various available deployment pathways for nuclear energy.
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) started in 2000 with the development of such integrated nuclear energy system models, i.e. DYMOND and more recently DANESS. These models are based on system dynamics modelling used in various industry sectors and allowing to model the full mass-flow chain of time-varying mixes of nuclear reactor plants and associated fuel cycle options. Several other sub-models may then be coupled to the mass-flow kernel to calculate heat loads, economics, life cycle inventory, and several other parameters and feedback decision-making loops important in the assessment of nuclear energy futures.
This paper concerns a project of limited scope to study why innovations in health care often fail to be adopted and how this may be improved. The project consisted of two workshops with participants from different areas of health care. The objective was to identify factors influencing adoption of innovations, relating the factors to each other, and looking for measures to stimulate the adoption of innovations. During the first workshop, possible effects of innovations and prerequisites for adopting innovations were identified and prioritised. This resulted in draft causal loop diagrams. During the second workshop, refined diagrams were used to identify measures for stimulating the adoption of innovations. In addition, a game incorporating the results of the workshops was developed. The main causal mechanisms were translated into the game which can be played by people who work in health care to improve their understanding of some of the dynamics involved.
System dynamics models are being used by more and more businesses to train employees from new hires to veteran managers, communicate strategic change within the company, share mental models between stakeholders and align business perspectives between business units. Advances in computer technologies help this process to a great extent by enabling users to interact with models more effectively and efficiently. This workshop will introduce you to ExTrain(r), one such technology that facilitates the use of simulation models in strategy communication and management training.
The ExTrain(r) is a web-based application platform that serves as a virtual practice field for managers to exercise decision-making power under various business conditions in a risk-free environment. ExTrain(r) applications can be used in individual online simulation sessions or within a facilitated environment with interaction from trainers. Each application is also supported with a facilitation tool that allows trainers to monitor simulation progress, user performance and intervene if necessary.
In this workshop, we will introduce you to the ExTrain(r) platform and its new features from a user perspective. You will also get a chance to learn more about the integration and maintenance of simulation models within ExTrain(r) environment. There will also be a hands-on demonstration of the system where participants will take part in a sample war-game application. Participants will be divided into four teams, each of which will take control of a virtual technology company. Starting on level ground, you will compete for revenue growth while maximizing profit through various business decisions. Facilitation will be provided to help you understand the key business dynamics and formulate your strategy.
This paper describes the process of a combined system dynamics modeling and scenario planning approach. It empirically investigates how envisioning and probing system dynamic modeling has the potential to raise effectiveness of scenario planning for organizational learning and improved decision making. The approach is illustrated by means of a case study that was used to explore the influence of social trends on dynamic interactions between transport behavior and spatial development in Switzerland. In this case study a system dynamics model was developed that served as a communication tool for strategy development and for enhancing goal alignment between different policy sectors at the national level. A qualitative content analysis illustrates how comments from participants of group modeling workshops can be opened up as empirical indicators of stimuli for improved learning. Additionally, it gives empirical evidence that the chosen approach contributes to mitigating four drivers of unexpected decision failure as discriminated by Chermack (2004a): bounded rationality, the tendency to consider only exogenous variables, stickiness and friction of information and knowledge, and mental model with decision premises.
There was an interesting presentation at ISDC 2004 in Oxford. The title was Spatial urban dynamics presented by Peter Sanders and Frank Sanders. They expanded Forresters original urban dynamics model in terms of spatial point of view. While one of us has been studying Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and applying GIS to consumer spatial behavior. Recently we have got some research results, one of which explains how retailers agglomerate in a city, and the other shows one of the method of calculating relative attractiveness of retail areas. In this paper, we make some contribution toward spatial urban dynamics, firstly discussing the importance of the concept of attractiveness in social sciences, secondly showing latest research result on the attractiveness outside of system dynamics field and how to take it into spatial urban dynamics, thirdly making constructive comments on Sanders approach, finally referring to a strong possibility of expanding spatial urban dynamics toward national models and world models.
This paper discusses our project under a three-year research contract with the Japanese Government to gain public acceptance of nuclear facilities in local communities by improving risk communication through a gaming/simulation approach. Evidence suggests that nuclear public education programs are not communicating the critical safety information necessary to eliminate anxiety of people living around nuclear facilities. To most utilities and government, risk communication means persuasion. Based on the findings of our visits to several authorities, municipalities and nuclear facilities in Japan, Sweden, Norway and USA, we built a causal-loop model regarding nuclear risk communication. According to our model, the root cause of the problem is lack of trust, and the leverages are public participation and transparency which can create learner-centered two-way communication environment. THE TREASURE HUNTING, one of our five gaming/simulations for this project, is intended to create such an environment so that local residents may deepen understanding of nuclear risk and build up a mutual trust relationship with disaster prevention experts. After many internal test runs, we have run this exercise six times so far with the nuclear disaster prevention experts and the local residents near nuclear facilities in various parts of Japan. The results have been quite satisfactory.
The focus of this paper is information exploration using alternative utilization models to test how a supply chain responds to demand changes. From the feedback perspective, it is found that the echelon stock policy generates a more complex feedback structure than the installation stock policy; and has different time patterns of inventory adjustment actions. Considering the relative higher cost for small- and medium- size enterprises to adopt advance information technology in our textile supply chain case, this paper further examines the impact of information technology in the echelon stock policy and the installation stock policy. The findings show that information technology investment could be more beneficial for supply chains with the installation stock policy. Finally, this paper mixes the PID controller design concept with the two information utilization models and so suggests further development for information utilization designs.
Organizations are becoming more aware about the importance of economic, financial and risk management aspects of information system security. As a result, the balance between preventive and corrective security strategies must be studied. We understand Preventive Security as the ability of organizations to avoid the impact of an incident and Corrective Security as the ability of the firm to recover from the losses generated by an incident.
This paper presents a model to analyze the Preventive-Corrective security balance. The main objective of this model is to simulate and analyze the impact that two security behaviors (security investments and strategy) can have one a given enterprise environment. After running 54 simulations, some interesting security behaviors called our attention.