Road Maps

A Guide to Learning System Dynamics

Road Maps is a self-study guide to learning system dynamics. It is organized as a series of chapters, and was developed by the System Dynamics in Education Project (SDEP) at MIT under the direction of Professor Jay Forrester. Ten chapters of Road Maps are available for download. Road Maps teaches the reader how to identify different kinds of systems all around us and how to model these systems. Road Maps can be a resource for both beginners and advanced system dynamics modelers, and requires no previous system dynamics knowledge and only basic math skills.

Getting Started

Each chapter contains a number of individual papers - use the links below to navigate to each chapter. With each paper, a short annotation is included.

To learn more about Road Maps, please see the introduction (D-4500-10). The introduction gives a summary of the contents of each chapter, advises on the best way to use Road Maps and explains what you will need to begin your study.

Road Maps Appendix & Books

The Road Maps Appendix contains a collection of short papers that are designed to help the reader during the process of going through Road Maps. The papers include the Road Maps Glossary (pdf), A guide to using Vensim and converting from STELLA to Vensim, and a series of papers on system dynamics modeling.

There are several books required to help you complete Road Maps.