System Dynamics

【Topic 1: Problem Solving.  Subtopic 1.6: System Dynamics】

HOW to solve a problem (thoughts of 90’s)?

A 1994 book “The Fifth Discipline Field book” is written by Peter Senge, et al., followers of Jay Forrester.  They upgrade Forrester’s theory of system dynamics to suit for business management.  The book is well written and easy to read.  The five disciplines, quote from the book, are:

• Personal Mastery – learning to expand our personal capacity to create the results we most desire, and creating an organizational environment which encourages all its members to develop themselves toward the goals and purposes they choose.

• Mental Models – reflecting upon, continually clarifying, and improving our internal pictures of the world, and seeing how they shape our actions and decisions.

• Shared Vision – building a sense of commitment in a group, by developing shared images of the future we seek to create, and the principles and guiding practices by which we hope to get there.

• Team Learning – transforming conversational and collective thinking skills, so that groups of people can reliably develop intelligence and ability greater than the sum of individual members’ talents.

• Systems Thinking – a way of thinking about, and a language for describing and understanding, the forces and interrelationships that shape the behavior of systems.  This discipline helps us see how to change systems more effectively, and to act more in tune with the larger processes of the natural and economic world.

As a matter of fact, system dynamics developed by Jay Forrester in the 60’s has general math equations that can be applied to not only business management, but also ecology, education, and world economy.  You may call it Equation-Based Model (EBM).  It is this generalized nature that we are going to combine EBM (as macro model) with Agent-Based Model (ABM, as micro models) to develop our artificial intelligence virtual machine (AIVM).