Core Software

When the book Industrial Dynamics was published it used Dynamo as the modeling language. Dynamo was a breakthrough at the time and foreshadowed a number of numerical modeling approaches and non-procedural programming languages. It was a text-based system for representing model equations and continued to be used for multiple decades as the basis for such works as Urban Dynamics, World Dynamics, and The Limits to Growth. Current software for System Dynamics is diagram based, but the equations are still part of the model and retain forms quite similar to those of Dynamo.

The most commonly used software packages are listed below in alphabetical order. Additional tools that support model construction are noted at the end.