Courses and Conferences

Ventana offers a one day introductory courses in system dynamics and Vensim as well as a one day course that covers more advanced Vensim topics.  These courses are relatively fast paced, but class size is limited so that the coverage can be kept consistent with the goals of the participants. 

For training in Europe, Ventana Systems UK offers both introductory and advanced courses.  Our distributor in Germany, SIMCON also offers seminars on system dynamics in German.

For a more complete academic grounding in system dynamics consider the distance system dynamics program offered by the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).  This is a distance program in system dynamics that includes both introductory courses, applications courses and a number of advanced topic courses. 

In addition to the straight training courses there are two annual conferences that provide educational opportunities and may be of interest. Ventana is proud to sponsor the annual conference of the System Dynamics Society whish is held each summer. For 2005 the conference will be in Boston, July 17-21. More information is available at http://www.systemdynamics.org.  Pegasus Communications puts on the Systems Thinking in Action conference in the fall of each year. This year it is in San Francisco, Nov. 14-16 see http://www.pegasuscom.com for more information.

Introduction to System Dynamics

This is a one day course held on either the East Coast (usually Boston) or in the West (usually Las Vegas) approximately four times a year.  A thorough introduction to systems thinking and system dynamics simulation. The course covers formulating a problem, describing the structure of a system, developing a simulation model, and analyzing the output. This course is appropriate for people who have a limited or no background in model building.

Next date offered: September 25 in Boston Course Order Form (print from your browser)

Advanced Topics in Vensim

The Advanced Topics course is intended for people who have some familiarity with Vensim and system dynamics modeling, or technically inclined people who have attended Introduction to System Dynamics with Vensim course or web course. It will lay the foundations for the use of powerful modeling tools, improving your ability to simulate and understand more complex problems. 

Learn to build models using subscripting (array) techniques, which allow easy replication of structure. For example, in a marketplace with many similar competing firms, one structure can be used to represent the generic firm, with subscripts distinguishing the individual firms. 

Learn to use Vensim's optimizer to fit a model to historical data and select effective policies. Test the robustness of policies with Monte Carlo sensitivity techniques. Find out which factors strongly influence your results, and which do not. 

The material presented during this course does not presume a strong mathematical background, though many of the concepts presented are based on fairly sophisticated mathematics. Supplemental course notes provide more of the mathematical details for those wishing to pursue issues more deeply. 

Next date offered: September 26  in Boston  Course Order Form (print from your browser)