UK Chapter of the System Dynamics Society

There is a survey being carried out to capture attitudes of our Modelling & Simulation (M&S) community towards both Reproducibility and Open Science in simulation publishing.

There are major concerns that the results in many published peer-reviewed articles cannot be reproduced or verified independently.  Some journals are changing their policies to address these issues. Open Science approaches go further in that they encourage the open sharing of scientific artefacts (e.g. data, software, methods, processes, etc.) under appropriate terms and conditions to enable reuse, redistribution and reproduction of the research and its underlying data and methods.  Publishing policies in both Reproducibility and Open Science could have a major impact on how we approach M&S research in the future.

The survey consists of six sections and will take around 20-25 minutes to complete. The results will be published as both a report and a journal paper. Both will be open access.

The survey will be open until December 2018.

Access the survey at https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/25864

The Operational Research Society is running a Simulation Workshop (SW18) on 19th to 21st March 2018 at the Ettington Chase Hotel, near Stratford. More information on the event at www.theorsociety.com/SW18

It is still possible to submit posters for the event,  which offers a platform to show off the incredible SD work that you are involved with. (Plus there is a prize for best poster!). If you would like to submit a poster, then you need to submit a 150 word poster abstract to the Poster Stream, here   –  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sw18  by the deadline of 8^th January 2018.

This is open to all delegates i.e. from practice, simulation software development and research. Posters could contain:

• An overview of a simulation case study either complete or in progress;
• An overview of a simulation research project either complete or in progress;
• A description of an important issue in simulation research or practice;
• A description of a new way to visualise simulation results;
• An overview of a piece of simulation software;
• Insights from practice about how to successfully run simulation studies;
• Links between simulation and analytics;
• Links between simulation and behavioural OR

Society member Peter Lacey will be presenting on ‘System Dynamics in Healthcare’ at the SCiO Open Meeting being held at Manchester Business School on October 16. Peter will provide insights from the use of System Dynamics modelling over a 20 year career in health and social care consultancy. He will provide people with a walk through of some existing models and explore some of the pitfalls and benefits of the approach. There will be an opportunity to explore both quantitative and qualitative elements of systems and how they feature in SD modelling against a background of the culture and expectations of the health and care system today.

SCiO is a group for systems practitioners and is based in the UK, but has members internationally. It is focused primarily on systems practice and practitioners rather than on pure theory and on systems practice as applied to issues of organisation.

The open meeting costs £20 to attend, and also includes the following presentations:

• Portia Light – Fake art, bad science and what we can learn from using systems thinking to examine the mechanics of law
• Steve Whitla – Making more meaningful models: A hands-on guide
• Benjamin Taylor – Meta-contextuality through the medium of Bongard games: why methods and practices depend on context

More information on the event here – http://www.scio.org.uk/node/7503