System Models & Simulation

We live in a world of systems driven by cause and affect. Those systems include financial, production, inventory, biological, chemical, thermodynamic or workflow. Systems can be modeled as nodes representing system variables and connecting lines representing causal effects. The changing value of one variable can cause another to increase or decrease as described by equations. Understanding how a system really works is the first step towards using, improving, automating or explaining it to others. This paper shows how to model dynamic systems, run time simulations and present the system behavior with charts, graphs and tables. It provides example models for population growth, bank balance, demographics, production and water management.