Ventana software support forum

Some time ago a query was posted asking for tools that connect models to related documentation. May I suggest that these may be found in the Systems Engineering profession. The following are suggested for information only. I am not endorsing or advertising any product. The flagship tool in the SE pr...

Miss Melek Pisman, angel@bim.sau.edu.tr, recently requested an up-to-date
reading list on SD. I would hope any responses would be broadcast to the list,
since others of us who are also neophytes could benefit.

Regards, Bill Cutler
72734.3452@compuserve.com

Several recent postings address the question of whether and how to include human motivation in SD modeling. Has anyone looked at Fuzzy Logic (a la Lotfi Zadeh) as a mathematical basis for creating the necessary algorithms? Zadeh invented it in the first place as a means of representing the way the m...

To the SD Community, Much dialog goes on about the best way to teach SD, and the value of various levels of understanding, from blind faith in a black box through simulations built out of functional icons to mastery of the underlying math. I think wed all agree that faith in black boxes is very dang...

To the System Dynamics Community. As somewhat of an outsider, I guess I dont appreciate why there is so much concern over the question of discrete vs. continuous modeling techniques, and limiting the techniques that can be called SD. >From my background in Systems Engineering, the process I am famil...

I recently sent this to Ed Gallagher in reply to one of his postings, and he suggested I post it to the whole group. I recently heard a success story about the wedding of simulation with experiment. The New Zealand Americas Cup team used simulation as a tool in the design of their winning entry. The...

To the System Dynamics Community, I am developing educational material to teach what I call *System Process* to lay people in government and public action groups. The purpose is to enable them to create effective solutions to *complex unprecedented system* problems. (Definitions of terms in ** to fo...

To the Systems Dynamics Community, In one of the recent postings, I ran across the term *Desert Island Dynamics*. It apparently refers to a body of basic literature in the SD field. Where can I access it? Inquisitively, Bill Cutler 4114 Park Blvd. Palo Alto, CA 94306 415-493-8715 72734.3452@compuser...

Paul Kucera writes, in reply to my suggestion to use hierarchy as an antidote to spaghetti-itis: >Good SD models are almost often built top down as was >suggested, but using the stock flow language can often be more helpful in >getting to meangingful structure than can applying some exogenous struct...

June 3, 1996 To the SD Community, The antidote to spaghetti-itis is hierarchy. Question: Is this network-hierarchy representation described below necessary and sufficient to represent any system, or is there a fundamentally different representation which is needed for certain classes of systems? I t...

June 3, 1996 To the SD Community, Feedback. Feedforward. I dont think the words per se are important. The important issue is to get an accurate representation of the system. Of course, in talking about that representation, it is important to have commonly understood terms, which in their precise tec...