I have a bit of a technical systems question for the list.
Im currently planning a short course on theories for sustainable
futures, and as you may expect models will play a significant part of
this course. The models in the course will mostly be integrated
socio-economic models - some will be system dynamic models, other
complex adaptive system models (containing interacting heterogeneous
populations), and others still spatial models.
The course participants will be graduate students, or ecological
managers with a graduate student level academic background. I expect
there will be some fairly skilled programmers in the course. We expect
that people will play with, use, and modify some of the models in the
course. The modelling environments I am currently planning to use are:
Excel, Vensim, Matlab, and Visual Basic.
With Matlab being the preferred environment.
Excel being good for some simple models.
Vensim being good for systems dynamics and simple CAS models.
Matlab being good for everything, but bigger spatial models.
And visual basic for sophisticated spatial models.
I was wondering what people think of these (preliminary choices).
What modeling environments people would recommend.
Especially, does anyone have any suggestions about why I should use
Vensim rather than Stella?
There is a free, but limited, version of Vensim available, which is in
its favour.
And, why should I use Visual Basic, rather than Java, C, or some other
programming language?
Any recommendations, comments or suggestions would be most welcome.
Thanks,
Garry
-----------------------------------------------------
Garry Peterson
From: Garry Peterson <
peterson@nceas.ucsb.edu>
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
735 State St., Suite 300
Santa Barbara, CA 93101-5504 tel: 805 892-2528
http:
www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~peterson fax: 805 892-2510