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Home Issues Issue 16 Methodology of system dynamics for decision support in agriculture

Methodology of system dynamics for decision support in agriculture

Miroljub KLJAJIĆ, Andrej ŠKRABA and Črtomir ROZMAN
pp. 7-16

The sustainable development of complex systems, and therefore agriculture as a relevant part of ecology, should be the permanent development paradigm of mankind. Conditions should be provided so that nature could regenerate itself by allowing for only a reasonable impact of human activity and presence on nature and in such a way preserve resources for the next generation. In this article, we discuss system dynamics as a holistic research methodology in the support of dynamic complex problems. Our goal is to demonstrate the usefulness of System Dynamics (SD) methodology in research and its implementation for public decision support. We briefly discuss the fundamentals of SD methodology models and causal loop diagrams (CLD) as well as model validation. Some examples of modelling for public decision assessment of sustainable development using SD have been demonstrated. The advantage of SD is in its natural language problem definition, which can be easily transformed into a directed graph that is convenient for qualitative and quantitative analysis in computer programs. System Dynamics enables studying the behaviour of complex dynamic systems as the feedback processes of reinforcing and balancing loops.

Key words: system dynamics, modelling, complex systems, decision assessment, systems approach, agriculture

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