Lecture D4 - Morecroft (2010, Chapter 3), "Modelling Dynamic Systems" (2020-02-20)

This lecture is focused primarily on the content of Chapter 3 from Morecroft (2010) on "Modeling Dynamic Systems." We start with a very brief Insight Maker tutorial and then drill down into the main content of the chapter. We introduce stocks, flows, and coordinating networks of links between them. We also motivate how stock-and-flow diagrams when combined with computer simulation (or numerical integration) provides an alternative methodology for investigating dynamical systems that does not require the formal methods of calculus. We end with a basic dynamical systems model of a city allocating police to manage the illegal drug market and discuss basic verification and validation (V&V) with respect to the graphs that come out of the simulated model.