Guest Editor's Introduction
- PDF / 53,528 Bytes
- 1 Pages / 595 x 842 pts (A4) Page_size
- 93 Downloads / 223 Views
#1999 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/99 $12.00 http://www.stockton-press.co.uk/jor
Guest Editors' Introduction The discipline of system dynamics was conceived, as is well known, by Professor Jay Forrester and his co-workers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1950s. Forrester's brilliant insight was to realise that the concepts of feedback control theory could, and should, be applied to policy design in all kinds of managed systems. His insight was made reality by the further recognition that the complexity of managed systems was too great for pure analytical methods. What was required, and what Forrester devised, was a unique combination of visual modelling, non-linear algebra and simulation, thus leading to a new discipline and to special computer languages such as DYNAMO as the practical and experimental foundation for the approach. Since then, there have been extensive applications, numerous research publications, accumulation of academic dissertations and several textbooks. The inter-national System Dynamics Society was established in 1983 and a refereed journal, the System Dynamics Review was launched in 1985, building on the original journal, Dynamica. Although system dynamics originated at MIT and still ¯ourishes there, it has spread to many other universities world-wide. The UK has been no exception and the ®rst academic group here was established by one of us (Geoff Coyle) in 1970 at the University of Bradford. The passage of about 25 years of UK effort in system dynamics seemed to call for a special edition of the Journal of the Operational Research Society to record a little of that history. But mainly it allowed us to re¯ect current work from UK practitioners and some continental Europeans. We were pleased to accept an invitation to edit the special issue. Apart from celebrating the ®rst 25 years of system dynamics in the UK we have sought to provide readers of this Journal with an up-to-date image of the ®eld and its impact on policy, strategy and management education. We also wished to show a representative sample of contemporary applications and research. Finally, the special issue provides an opportunity to draw together the UK system dynamics community and to form a UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society. This special issue builds on and then extends Geoff Coyle's Silver Jubilee paper which appears immediately after this introduction. From this historical base the special
issue presents a series of articles that demonstrate where the ®eld is now. Each article is written to highlight a positive and substantive project or initiative that also challenges (implicitly) misperceptions of the ®eld. Although there is conceptual, theoretical and even philosophical content, the emphasis is plainly on practical applications that demonstrate theory in action. In soliciting papers we aimed at four broad themes. The ®rst theme surveys current educational programmes and professional infrastructure in the UK and continental Europe to indicate how the ®el
Data Loading...
