15.879  Research Seminar in System Dynamics (PhD)

Final reminders

Dear All,

Just a final reminder to make sure all surveys are taken care of before the deadline this Friday:
1- MIT official course evaluation:
http://web.mit.edu/subjectevaluation
2- Team member evaluations:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RH25RHQ
3- Course evaluations for the instructor:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TQ3JYSY
4- Project reviews:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/T9ZD33R
Have a happy summer!
Hazhir

Announced on 21 May 2014  8:53  a.m. by Hazhir Rahmandad

Official Class Evaluation

Folks,

Please take a few seconds to complete the official MIT course evaluation (if you are taking it for credit or as an official listener). It is an important component of faculty evaluation and your participation is much appreciated. The link follows:
http://web.mit.edu/subjectevaluation

cheers,
hazhir

Announced on 09 May 2014  2:22  p.m. by Hazhir Rahmandad

Tutorial submission and review guidelines

Folks,

Your tutorials are due March 30th (midnight). Here are some instructions:
1- When ready, please upload them into the common dropbox, the specific folder for tutorials, under the topic of your group. Include all the files needed for replicating the work as well as the video file. You may upload the video to YouTube or Vimeo if you wish, but keep the original file for future reference anyways.
2- You will be reviewing the 3 tutorials you were not involved in using the following survey (deadline is April 11th): https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/RNBSC5X
Please review this survey now to know the dimensions over which your tutorial will be evaluated by others.
cheers,
hazhir

Announced on 06 March 2014  9:50  a.m. by Hazhir Rahmandad

Process Handout and Tutorials

A few ad hoc notes to help with your work:
1- I have uploaded the detailed set of process handouts by Hines. These are useful for shaping your project process and presentations. Note that this document relies on a feedback-based modeling process with a client, which may not be what you are using for your project, so do not attempt to follow it precisely, only get what may be useful from it and apply to your work.
2-Those students registered for credit who are not part of one of the four teams should get in touch with the existing teams to join one for their tutorial development; the full list of teams and tutorials are available on stellar to facilitate; note that only one new member can join each team and it is first come first served.
3-Finally, if you can't get Sterman 85 model to equilibrium, that is fine, just replicate the behavior mode in figure 8 and explain that without starting from equilibrium.

regards,
hazhir

Announced on 18 February 2014  10:09  a.m. by Hazhir Rahmandad

Session 03 homework

Folks,

Besides the readings (Kampmann 91, Shantizis & Behrens 73; on stellar) that will give you a flavor of how you should critique models, your homework for this week includes replication and analysis of Sterman 85 (paper on stellar). The equations for the model are listed at the end of the paper and your goal is to build that model in Vensim, replicate its behavior (specifically, try to replicate the behavior in figure 8, with self ordering mechanism active), and understand where that behavior comes from (in terms of different contributing loops and structures), using the method we discussed today.
This is a relatively simple model with pretty interesting behavior modes; replicating it is a great exercise to learn good model structures and formulations and the analysis will be instructive, so I highly recommend you do work on it.

Cheers,
hazhir

Announced on 14 February 2014  1:48  p.m. by Hazhir Rahmandad