According to an implicit “start simple” principle widely accepted by system dynamics practioners, model’s complexity must be progressively increased during the modeling process. How this increase in complexity should come about has yet to be explained. In this paper, two strategies are discussed and evaluated. Since a top-down strategy starts with a high level of aggregation but includes in the model all the main variables since the first formulation, it is to be preferred to a bottom-up scheme. Moreover, the top-down strategy ensures the global coherence of the model at any stage of its conception and appears to be much more consistent with the system dynamics philosophy. This paper emphasizes the need for an adequate computer modeling language and briefly describes a first attempt. The main property of such a language is to allow a hierarchical description of models, where any composing unit can be altered without the need for a complete recompiling of the whole.

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Date created

• 1976

Type

• Document

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• Processing documentation available at: https://wiki.albany.edu/display/SCA/Processing+Ingested+Digital+Files

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• Creative Commons BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International

  
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dbb17ec8affa7ecbcd419a760cb61093

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

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Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives