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Listing all articles in Systems-Thinking Resources under the category 'Modelling' :

 

Book : Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management (2003)

Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management

Publisher:Artech House Publishing

Author(s): Hitchins, Derek K.

Published: 2003 ISBN: 1580536190 • 489 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Hardback

Summary

From the publisher:

No matter what field you are working in or studying, Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering, and Management offers you a comprehensive understanding of systems ideas and methods to help you achieve unmatched success with your challenging projects. This unique resource helps you add a systems-scientific grounding to systems engineering enterprises, showing you how to solve intractable problems, design systems to accommodate complex environments, and manage both creative and operational systems. You learn how to conceive, design and manage a systems engineering process for optimal results.

The book is filled with examples and case studies from a wide range of areas, from integrated transport systems, security systems, and defense procurement, to missile defense architectures, famine relief, and managing markets. This innovative reference introduces a generic systems lifecycle theory that helps you understand how systems form, persist and decay, and presents a 5-layer classification for systems engineering. You discover how to use a generic reference model that allows systems of all types to be addressed within a common framework. Moreover, the book reveals how architecture is used to create system emergent properties, capabilities and behaviors.



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Book : Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem (1995)

Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem

Categories: BusinessModellingSystems Thinking

Tags: bionomicsbookdarwinevolutionholtorganisationrothschild

Publisher:Henry Holt & Company

Author(s): Rothschild, Michael

Published: 1995 ISBN: 0805019790 • 423 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

Capitalism, or the market economy, or the free enterprise system—whatever you choose to label it—was not planned. Like life on earth, it did not need to be. Capitalism just happened, and it will keep on happening. Quite spontaneously. Capitalism flourishes whenever it is not suppressed, because it is a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is the way human society organizes itself for survival in a world of limited resources.

A capitalist economy can best be comprehended as a living ecosystem. Key phenomena observed in nature: competition, specialization, cooperation, exploitation, learning, growth, and several others—are also central to business life. Moreover, the evolution of the global ecosystem and the emergence of modern industrial society are studded with striking parallels.

Briefly stated, information is the essence of both systems. In the biologic environment, genetic information, recorded in the DNA molecule, is the basis of all life. In the economic environment, technological information, captured in books, blueprints, scientific journals, databases, and the know-how of millions of individuals, is the ultimate source of all economic life.

Bionomics is not a new "theory"—some new doctrine or ideology.There’s already been entirely too much of that. Instead, this book offers a fresh new perspective, a new way of observing the facts before us. When you adjust the focus on a microscope, blurry images pop into vivid detail. In all its marvelous complexity and beauty, a world invisible to the naked eye suddenly becomes intelligible.

In a way, the bionomic perspective is an infinitely adjustable macroscope—an instrument for the mind’s eye—able to scan the panorama of the global economy or zoom in on its finest details. It is an observational technique that, once learned, comes easily. Complexities that confound traditional approaches yield to its insights. At a time of stunning change in the world, when the inadequacies of long-accepted points of view have become obvious, a new way of looking at old problems may be just what is needed.



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Book : Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modelling for a Complex World (2000)

Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modelling for a Complex World

Publisher:Irwin Professional Publishers

Author(s): Sterman, John D.

Published: 2000 ISBN: 0071179895 • 1008 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Hardback

Summary

From the publisher:

Accelerating economic, technological, social, and environmental change challenge managers and policy makers to learn at increasing rates, while at the same time the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing.  Many of the problems we now face arise as unanticipated side effects of our own past actions.  All too often the policies we implement to solve important problems fail, make the problem worse, or create new problems.

Effective decision making and learning in a world of growing dynamic complexity requires us to become systems thinkers to expand the boundaries of our mental models and develop tools to understand how the structure of complex systems creates their behavior.

This book introduces you to system dynamics modeling for the analysis of policy and strategy, with a focus on business and public policy applications.  System dynamics is a perspective and set of conceptual tools that enable us to understand the structure and dynamics of complex systems.  System dynamics is also a rigorous modeling method that enables us to build formal computer simulations of complex systems and use them to design more effective policies and organizations.  Together, these tools allow us to create management flight simulators–microworlds where space and time can be compressed and slowed so we can experience the long-term side effects of decisions, speed learning, develop our understanding of complex systems, and design structures and strategies for greater success.



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Book : Industrial Dynamics (1992)

Industrial Dynamics

Categories: BusinessModellingSystem Dynamics

Tags: bookbusinessforresterithinkmodellingsystem dynamics

Publisher:Productivity Press Inc

Author(s): Forrester, Jay W.

Published: 1992 ISBN: 0915299887 • 464 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

How do you design corporate structures and policies that are compatible with the growth objectives of your organization? This text addresses this crucial question and explains how managers’ actions shape the dynamic characteristics of a broad range of organizations. A reprint of the original text, Industrial Dynamics also contains numerous two-color graphs to help illustrate the concepts.

Here is the book that started the study of system dynamics! This classic work is for anyone in management, whether a student or seasoned professional. Forrester looks at a company as a dynamic system of interacting elements, gives a methodology on how to model them, and shows through simulation how the company will be affected by changes. The book covers industrial systems, managerial uses of industrial dynamics, models, systems of equations, flow diagrams, policies and decisions, production-distribution systems, and much more! If you’re interested in ithink, this book is an essential for your library. If you use Optima !iThink, this book will give you good advice on modeling your corporation.



Book : Modelling for Learning Organisations (2000)

Modelling for Learning Organisations

Categories: BusinessModelling

Tags: bookmodellingsimulationsoft system

Publisher:Productivity Press Inc

Author(s): Morecroft, John • Sterman, John D.

Published: 2000 ISBN: 1563272504 • 426 pages

Summary

Test policies, discover flaws, and find hidden leverage points. System simulation allows you to predict the outcome of current and future situations on the whole system by testing different scenarios.

Conventional wisdom says that we can learn from our errors, but errors in the business world can be prohibitively costly. To truly understand how complex business organizations function requires different tools than most managers have been given. Yet managers need methods to understand how their organization works in order to test policies, discover flaws in thinking, and find the hidden leverage points within the complex systems they manage. Through a system simulation, the dynamics of the whole system, not just the individual parts, becomes apparent. The outcome of current and future situations becomes possible to predict and with this information, managers can focus on the changes that need to be made.

The distinguished contributors to Modeling for Learning Organizations include Jay W. Forrester, Peter Senge, and Arie De Geus. You will learn about leading applications such as:<

  • Shell’s work on modeling the oil producers.
  • The Management Flight Simulator, a computer-based case learning environment pioneered by John Sterman and others at MIT
  • The landmark Claims Learning Laboratory at Hanover Insurance companies.

For managers, professionals, academicians, and everyone who recognizes the profound implications of modeling, this book is an excellent resource. It offers a broad understanding of the modeling process, discusses a multitude of case studies, and provides a review of the most recent simulation software.



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Book : Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager’s Guide to Applying Systems (2002)

Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Manager’s Guide to Applying Systems

Publisher:Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd.

Author(s): Sherwood, Dennis

Published: 2002 ISBN: 185788311X • 235 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

From the publisher:

Systems thinking can help you tame the complexity of real world problems by providing a structured way of balancing a broad, overall view with the selection of the right level of detail, truly allowing you to see the forest for the trees.

Only by taking a broad view can we avoid the twin dangers of a silo mentality - in which a fix ‘here’ simply shifts the problem to ‘there’ - and organisational myopia - in which a fix ‘now’ gives rise to a much bigger problem to fix ‘then’.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees will give you all the tools and techniques you need, with many practical examples as diverse as managing a busy back office, negotiating an outsourcing deal and formulating business strategy.

Dennis Sherwood was for twelve years a consulting partner with Coopers & Lybrand and was subsequently an Executive Director at Goldman Sachs in London, a partner in Bossard Consultants, and Vice President of SRI Consulting. Educated at the universities of Cambridge, Yale and California, and a Sloan Fellow, with Distinction, of the London Business School, he is now the Managing Director of Organica Consulting which specialised in building competitive advantage through innovation whose clients include Thames Water, Nestle, National Grid, Pearson TV, The Defence Evaluation & Research Agency, Wedgewood, and Yorkshire Electricity. He is a is well-known on the conference circuit and is the author of five previous books including Smart Things to Know About Innovation and Unlock Your Mind.



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Book : Soft Systems Methodology in Action (1999)

Soft Systems Methodology in Action

Publisher:John Wiley & Sons

Author(s): Checkland, Peter • Scholes, Jim

Published: 1999 ISBN: 0471986054 • 418 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

From the publisher:

Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, successful in technical problems, could be used by managers to cope with the unfolding complexities of everyday life.  His findings were revealed in Systems Thinking, Systems Practice.  In this paperback reissue of his second classic of systems literature, again featuring the excerpted new section, Checkland develops his ideas to show how the principles have been extended by use in industry.  Case studies are used to show how SSM can be applied and what lessons can be learned from its application in different areas.



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Book : Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (30 Year Retrospective) (1999)

Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (30 Year Retrospective)

Publisher:John Wiley & Sons

Author(s): Checkland, Peter

Published: 1999 ISBN: 0471986062 • 416 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Paperback

Summary

From the publisher:

Systems Thinking, Systems Practice Whether by design, accident or merely synchronicity, Checkland appears to have developed a habit of writing seminal publications near the start of each decade which establish the basis and framework for systems methodology research for that decade. Hamish Rennie, Journal of the Operational Research Society, 1992.

Thirty years ago Peter Checkland set out to test whether the Systems Engineering (SE) approach, highly successful in technical problems, could be used by managers coping with the unfolding complexities of organizational life. The straightforward transfer of SE to the broader situations of management was not possible, but by insisting on a combination of systems thinking strongly linked to real-world practice Checkland and his collaborators developed an alternative approach - Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) - which enables managers of all kinds and at any level to deal with the subtleties and confusions of the situations they face. This work established the now accepted distinction between ‘hard’ systems thinking, in which parts of the world are taken to be ‘systems’ which can be ‘engineered’, and ‘soft’ systems thinking in which the focus is on making sure the process of inquiry into real-world complexity is itself a system for learning.

Systems Thinking, Systems Practice (1981) and Soft Systems Methodology in Action (1990) together with an earlier paper Towards a Systems-based Methodology for Real-World Problem Solving (1972) have long been recognized as classics in the field. Now Peter Checkland has looked back over the three decades of SSM development, brought the account of it up to date, and reflected on the whole evolutionary process which has produced a mature SSM.

SSM: A 30-Year Retrospective, here included with Systems Thinking, Systems Practice closes a chapter on what is undoubtedly the most significant single research programme on the use of systems ideas in problem solving.

Now retired from full-time university work, Peter Checkland continues his research as a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow.



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Course : T553_1 Systems Modelling (1999)

T553_1 Systems Modelling

Publisher:The Open University

Author(s): —Unknown—

Published: 1999 Delivery Format: Online (Internet)

Summary

Provided by The Open University under their OpenLearn website as a free study units with a discussion forum. Study independently at your own pace or join a group and use the free learning tools to work with others.

Time: 4 hours

Level: Introductory

From the Open University:

Maps and plans, architects and engineers, drawings, graphs and tables: all are models we use in everyday life. This unit will introduce you to the modelling process enabling you to recognise that systems models may be used in different ways as part of a process for: improving understanding of a situation; identifying problems or formulating opportunities and supporting decision making.

Learning Outcomes

After working through these materials you should be able to:

  • describe and use a general classification of models;
  • outline and discuss the process of systems modelling, where models are used as part of a systemic approach to a range of different situations;
  • recognise that systems models may be used in different ways as part of a process for: improving understanding of a situation; identifying problems or formulating opportunities; supporting decision making.


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Book : The Art of Systems Architecting, Third Edition (2009)

The Art of Systems Architecting, Third Edition

Publisher:CRC Press

Author(s): Maier, M.W. • Rechtin, E.R.

Published: 2009 ISBN: 1420079131 • 472 pages Delivery Format: Hard Copy - Hardback

Summary

From the publisher:

Features

  • Discusses a heuristics-based approach that provides an organized attack on very ill-structured engineering problems
  • Includes heuristics and case studies that address critical market segments, such as builder-architected systems, software-systems, and systems-of-systems
  • Examines architecture as more than a set of diagrams and documents, but as a set of decisions that either drive a system to success or doom it to failure
  • Provides methods for integrating business strategy with technical architectural decision making
  • Covers the foundations of systems architecting, the general roots of the practices, and practitioner guidance

Summary

If engineering is the art and science of technical problem solving, systems architecting happens when you don’t yet know what the problem is. The third edition of a highly respected bestseller, The Art of Systems Architecting provides in-depth coverage of the least understood part of systems design: moving from a vague concept and limited resources to a satisfactory and feasible system concept and an executable program. The book provides a practical, heuristic approach to the “art” of systems architecting. It provides methods for embracing, and then taming, the growing complexity of modern systems.

New in the Third Edition:

  • Five major case studies illustrating successful and unsuccessful practices
  • Information on architecture frameworks as standards for architecture descriptions
  • New methods for integrating business strategy and architecture and the role of architecture as the technical embodiment of strategy
  • Integration of process guidance for organizing and managing architecture projects
  • Updates to the rapidly changing fields of software and systems-of-systems architecture
  • Organization of heuristics around a simple and practical process model

A Practical Heuristic Approach to the Art of Systems Architecting

Extensively rewritten to reflect the latest developments, the text explains how to create a system from scratch, presenting invention/design rules together with clear explanations of how to use them. The author supplies practical guidelines for avoiding common systematic failures while implementing new mandates. He uses a heuristics-based approach that provides an organized attack on very ill-structured engineering problems. Examining architecture as more than a set of diagrams and documents, but as a set of decisions that either drive a system to success or doom it to failure, the book provide methods for integrating business strategy with technical architectural decision making.



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