Introducing Formal Qualitative Reasoning Techniques to System Dynamics Modelling and Analysis
Neil Smith · 2000
System dynamics techniques, such as influence diagrams, are used to model poorly understood systems. Qualitative analysis of these models is often extremely vague. More rigorous analysis requires quantitative simulation and can only occur after an additional conversion to a ‘stock and flow ’ model. In this paper we present some augmentations to influence diagrams that allow analysis and simulation to proceed directly from influence diagrams. In addition, we show how, in some limited situations, reliable and formal qualitative predictions of stability can be drawn from such models using the notion of parametric variation.