The SD Model in Depth
Customized Factory Packages
TELE-WORX Making Communications Work...
Customized factory packages are shared or purchased and loaded on demand to provide the user with an application extension of factories and a “cookbook” to model and solve a particular problem with their System Dynamics Calculator. A comprehensive list of solutions that might be supported by customized factory packages is beyond the scope of this document. However, there are several packages of factories that are envisioned and discussed to illustrate the potential of this element of the System Dynamics Calculator.
The intent of a customized factory package is to give the user a palette of familiar terms and concepts to simply pick from with a minimum level of understanding required. Embedded in each factory is a set of interfaces into and out of the factory, and a behavior that is configurable within some bounds. For some factories, the embedded interfaces and behaviors will be identical, but the label is distinguishing; this approach eliminates a step to label the factory, and limits errors by reducing the knowledge required to apply the factory correctly.
Finance Factory Package
Finance Factories focus on the processing of money flows commonly found in households, business operations, banks and investment institutions.
Accumulation Account Finance Factories
Transaction Account Finance Factories
A number of factories are defined for common accounts that are maintained by institutions. Several finance factories are defined for conventional transaction accounts:
Investment Account Finance Factories
Several factories are defined for conventional investment accounts:
Several factories are defined for investment accounts that receive special tax treatment:
Periodic Payment Finance Factories
Several finance factories are defined for equal periodic payment accounts:
Past Flow and Future Flow Finance Factories
Several finance factories are defined that perform operations on past flows and future flows:
Significant work remains to describe finance factories.
Analysis Factory Package
Analysis factories apply a number of quantitative analysis techniques to the results of a simulation including inferential statistical techniques to see a pattern or a significant characteristic. In general, hypothesis testing and statistical tests on more than one set of data are covered below:
The following analysis factories are envisioned:
Significant work remains to describe analysis factories.
Natural Science Factories
A Natural Science Factory describes characteristics and behavior of biological systems including people. Two types of factories are anticipated: “non-thinking” or evolution factories, and “thinking” or decision factories.
A Decision Factory typically operates on intangible inflows. The output of the decision factory is a Boolean indicator that is either “true” or “false”. The decision factory represents decision making of an individual, a population sample or the population itself as simulation methods are applied differently for each case.
Several generic decision factories are envisioned:
Significant work remains to describe natural science factories.
Physical Science Factories
A Physical Science Factory describes characteristics and behavior of non-living systems. Two types of factories are anticipated: “micro-scale” or atomic factories for elemental particles, atoms or molecules, and “macro scale” or physical factories for objects.
The following generic atomic factory symbol is defined:
Several atomic factories are envisioned:
Significant work remains to describe physical science factories.
Customized Factory Packages
Finance Factory Package
Analysis Factory Package
Natural Science Factories
Physical Science Factories
Abstraction Layers, Fragments and Scripts
Appendix: The Modeling Process