Continuos or discrete variables?
Posted: Wed Mar 20, 2024 1:23 pm
What is the most suitable approach for VENSIM and for the essence of SD? Should we model discrete variables (such as the number of employees in a company) as continuous or discrete variables?
When considering the amount of personnel in a company, we never have fractions of people as employees; we always have a whole number of staff. Therefore, in VENSIM it is possible to model it like discrete variable adjusting the equations (such as input and output flow) to operate discretely. This result can be achieved by incorporating functions such as Integer or Step. But, also implies that a "quantum leap" occurs between the values obtained at each time interval (t0, t1, ..., tn).
Could this cause problems of numerical continuity or loss of information in VENSIM calculations, especially if the model is complex and combines this approach with continuous variables, such as leadership level?
Could it be that VENSIM, based on the essence of SD, would prefer it to be modeled as a continuous variable and that only if we need to present the information in some managerial dashboard, we process the continuous outputs of the model to transform them into discrete ones? Is that correct?
Thank you very much.
When considering the amount of personnel in a company, we never have fractions of people as employees; we always have a whole number of staff. Therefore, in VENSIM it is possible to model it like discrete variable adjusting the equations (such as input and output flow) to operate discretely. This result can be achieved by incorporating functions such as Integer or Step. But, also implies that a "quantum leap" occurs between the values obtained at each time interval (t0, t1, ..., tn).
Could this cause problems of numerical continuity or loss of information in VENSIM calculations, especially if the model is complex and combines this approach with continuous variables, such as leadership level?
Could it be that VENSIM, based on the essence of SD, would prefer it to be modeled as a continuous variable and that only if we need to present the information in some managerial dashboard, we process the continuous outputs of the model to transform them into discrete ones? Is that correct?
Thank you very much.