A group of senior managers and planners from a major oil company met to discuss the changing structure of the oil industry stemming from the moves of traditional producers into refining and retailing. This broad ranging discussion led to a system dynamics simulation model of the oil producers. The model produced new insights into the power and stability of OPEC (the major oil producers’ organization), the dynamics of oil prices, and the investment opportunities of non-OPEC producers.The paper traces the model development process, starting from group discussions, to flip chart drawings, to STELLA maps and finally to working simulations models. Particular attention is paid to the methods used to capture team knowledge and to ensure that the STELLA models reflected opinions and ideas from the meetings. The paper describes how diagrams of behavioral decision functions were used to collect ideas about the ‘logic’ of the principal producers’ production decisions. The diagrams served as a record of the meetings and the basis for first-cut STELLA maps. A selection of diagrams is used to illustrate the content of the model.A sub-group of the project team was involved in developing and testing an algebraic model. The paper shows partial model simulations similar to those used by the sub-group to build confidence and a sense of ‘ownership’ in the algebraic formulations. Further simulations show how the full model can simulate thinking about producers’ behavior and oil prices.

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Date created

• 1990

Type

• Document

Processing Activity

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

License

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

  
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ITEM CONTEXT

Part of

386b7d5fcd17a644199db727913a7a7a

Scope and Contents

Part of

e3ebd4855fa658877b17f518e29a6ac9

Scope and Contents

Part of

23d738ba88f8333bc39725f9cb5bd0b8

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Collection

System Dynamic Society Records

Scope and Contents

Collecting area

• This collection is part of the University Archives