26.04.2021Structural Analysis of System Dynamics Models

System dynamics (SD) is an established discipline to model and simulate complex dynamic systems. The primary goal of SD is to evaluate and design new policies that can impact the system under study in a desired way. This article introduces a new and coherent framework for model analysis, called structural analysis methods (SAM), to facilitate the policy design process in complex SD models. SAM provides a resource-efficient and effective means for the detection of candidate policy parameters. It enables to identify intended and unintended effects of  activating these  policy parameters, and  to  discover candidate structural changes such as introducing new variables and links in SD models. The main innovation of SAM is that it translates the structure of SD models into weighted digraphs allowing algorithmic tools from the realms of graph theory and network science to be applied to SD

We highly recommend you to read the paper, if you want to find out more about model building and analysis with System Dynamics!

Schoenenberger, L., Schmid, A., Tanase, R., Beck, M., & Schwaninger, M. (2021). Structural analysis of system dynamics models. Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory, 102333.