Barlas' Paper

Question 1

What is System Dynamics?

Answer 1

System dynamics adress increasingly complex, dynamic problems in the public and private arenas, and is applicable to a large spectrum of problems, e.g. national income problems, energy systems, sustainable development, politics, psychology etc.

System dynamics is an address the fundamental structural causes of long-term dynamic contemporary socio-economic problems witin a broad

Question 2

What are dynamic problems in the context of management and policy making?

Answer 2

Problems that are of persistent, chronic and recurring nature.

Question 3

What is a closed-loop system?

Question 4

What does it mean that a system i ‘systemic’ in nature?

Answer 4

They originate as a result of the complicated interactions between the system variables.

Question 5

What is a policy?

Question 6

What is the origin of system dynamics?

Answer 6

System dynamics as a discipline emerged in the late 1950s, as an attempt to adress dynamic, long-term policy issues, both in the public and corporate domain.

Jay W. Forrester and his team at MIT first coined the field Industrial Dynamics. They also worked on Urban Dynamics. System Dynamics was born. Also they worked on World Dynamics, and Limits To Growth.

Question 7

What is Industrial Dynamics?

Question 8

Who was Jay W. Forrester?

Question 9

What is Urban Dynamics?

Answer 9

A dynamic theory of how the construction of housing and businesses determine the growth and stagnation in an urban area.

Question 10

What is Limits to Growth?

Answer 10

Model that show how population growth and economic development policies can interact to yield overshoot and collapse dynamics, when crowding and overindustrialization exceed the finite capacity of the environment.

Question 11

What is World Dynamics?

Question 12

What is Overshoot?

Question 13

What is Collapse?

Question 14

What is Crowding?

Question 15

What is the history of the System Dynamics Society?

Answer 15

It was coined in 1983, and has over 1300+ members today.

Question 16

What problems can the System Dynamics Methodology be applied to? Give examples.

Answer 16

Systemic, feedback problems, where the dynamics of the variables of the system is closely associated with the structure of the system.

The main purpose of system dynamics methodology is to undesrtand the causes of undesirable dynamics and design new policies to ameliorate/eliminate them.

Question 17

What does ‘Dynamic’ mean?

Answer 17

“in motion” or “changing over time”.

Question 18

What are dynamical problems? Give some examples of dynamical problems.

Answer 18

Characterized by variables that undergo significant changes in time, e.g.:

• Inventory managers: Inventory that fluctuates
  *City administrators: solid waste, air and water pollution
• Wildlife Managers: declining species diversity

Question 19

What is exponential growth?

Question 20

What is oscillation?

Question 21

What is a feedback loop?

Question 22

What is the endogenous perspective?

Answer 22

The dynamic structure of a system is essentially caused by the internal feedback structure of some identifiable system.