![]() In almost all the cases for this kind of research I find that either SD is enough and should be used in its pure form, or SD has no role to play or adds no value to the research, the latter being a more common situation. It is not uncommon to see that the researcher has the task to develop a hybrid model, with a professor who has no idea about hybrid simulation models, or is an expert in only one of the three paradigms. With hybrid models, there’s a different story. I’m not sure about the quality of all these studies, but this is the place where SD seems to have a lot of potential. The SD community wants to push SD-related papers, there are suitable problems to solve, and most of the time they seem to match. When the research consists on doing a pure SD simulation, it has rarely been the case where I felt that using AB or DE was better. Generally associated with sustainability, high level policies or other social science related topics, the application of SD for these problems is generally well suited and with a potential of being useful from a research standpoint. Research on pure SD models is the best opportunity SD has to thrive. And the agenda for each is quite different. Some of my clients are students that are generally in a Master or PhD program, and I lost count on how many of them I helped in the process of building a scientific paper or supporting them on the the development of a simulation model, and here we have two distinctions on why SD is applied: pure SD models and hybrid models. This dynamic has a potential issue: the project needs to be developed using SD, because that’s the professor’s or university department’s agenda. Research work with a clear Agendaįirst, let’s remember that in the academic world, you have 3 actors: the student who needs to complete a project using SD, the professor who supervises this project and requires the project to be done using SD and the client (implicit or explicit) who wants to solve a problem and doesn’t care about the method used as long as the problem is solved. So the question is: why is SD not good enough for most of these projects? After developing hundreds of simulation models in the last few years, I can identify 3 main reasons why SD is used: for research, for necessity and as a novelty. But while I have used DE and AB in countless different projects of different nature in different industries, SD doesn’t seem to have the same versatility or applicability. I currently feel unbiased into which methodology to use for any simulation project, and I think I am sufficiently proficient in all of them. So, is SD dead? I can only talk about my experience but here it goes. And SD seems to be in an eternal struggle to get more popular and it doesn’t seem get enough traction, at least in the business/industrial world. In the industry, the use of discrete-events (DE) and agent-based (AB) models vastly surpasses the contribution of SD. And this is in fact an interesting question. ![]() I was recently asked if System Dynamics (SD) is dead.
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