The relationship between the dynamic behavior of individual components of a large system and the overall behavior of the large system has rarely been analyzed in the system dynamics literature. The usual approach is to treat the large system (e.g. a national economy) as a lumped-parameter version of the component systems. A number of examples from physical systems (plasma instabilities, fluid and chemical-reaction waves) suggest that the lumped parameter approach is not always adequate as a representation of the dynamics of systems or as a cogent explanation of the behavior of aggregate systems. In particular, new collective modes of behavior are found when the stochastic distribution of micro-level systems over internal states is considered. The proper treatment of the aggregation of micro-systems can reveal novel dynamic behavior modes and can indicate under what conditions these modes may become active. The explicit treatment of the aggregation of micro-systems can also clarify the relationships between the structure and parameters of the micro-systems and those of a lumped-parameter representation of the macro-system, thus giving some precision to arguments based on macro-level models of interacting micro-level systems. One approach to the study of the collective behavior of elementary systems uses the concept of a “dissipative structure” as developed by Prigogine and colleagues over the past fifteen years. This paper continues the work of a previous paper on the subject by applying the Master Equation Formulation to several generic models of first and second order (including delays, sigmoid growth, predator-prey and other oscillatory systems). Conditions under which novel aggregate behavior may be expected to appear are determined. Some linear systems do not present any novelty in the theory, most attention is focused on non-linear examples.

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Date created

• 1983

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• Document

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

  
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System Dynamic Society Records

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• This collection is part of the University Archives