System Dynamics Modeling of Community Sustainability in NetLogo

The goal of this project is to apply system dynamics modeling to a basic instance of the contemporary issue of sustainability. System dynamics modeling is especially well-suited to the topic of sustainability; the flows and stocks involved with this sort of modeling are the keys needed to express the relationships between quantities and to observe their interactions. My project would model an arbitrary system, which would be a basic model representative of more realistic systems. The results of the model will be displayed to the user graphically. The goal of this project is to create a system that functions harmoniously over a sustained period of time rather than one that spirals wildly out of control. Sustainability is of course a large, well-researched field and more complex research has certainly been conducted prior to this. However, I think that my project would nonetheless increase student understanding of the issue and system interactions, and that system dynamics provides a particularly insightful prospective for this topic.