Dear community,
Please, share this information with your PhD students. The deadline for registration is in two weeks!!!!
Behavioural OR and System Dynamics
University of Southampton 15 - 19th July 2024
This NATCOR course consists of two parts - the more established system dynamics modelling part and a newer part (only taught once before) on behavioural modelling. The two parts are inter-related and it is recommended that students enrol in both, although it is possible to enrol in either one of the two.
The course is led by academic staff from the University of Southampton, Konstantinos Katsikopoulos who chairs the OR Society's special interest group on Behavioural OR and has recently single-authored a monograph on the topic (published by Palgrave Macmillan), and Martin Kunc who chairs the special interest group of the OR Society on OR and Strategy and is an Editor-in-Chief of JORS. The two parts will be held back-to-back: First, the Behavioural OR part will focus on operational decision making and then the System Dynamics part will focus on behavioural modelling with a strategic perspective. Modelling is a common core for both parts, with Behavioural OR focusing more on mathematical modelling and machine learning and System Dynamics focusing more on computer modelling and simulation. In addition to sessions by the two course staff, there will also be sessions by guest academics who are leaders in their respective fields.
Description and value: Behavioural modelling
This two-and-a-half-day course will focus on those domains of OR in which mathematical modelling has been mostly developing and yielding intellectual and practical benefits, including decision analysis, game theory, classification and prediction. The course will be founded on a key feature of behavioural science-the distinction among normative, descriptive and prescriptive models. The course will be valuable to all of those OR students who have noticed the limits of approaches that are insensitive to how (i) human behaviour is modelled in models, (ii) clients interact with models and (iii) policy makers utilize models in their decision making-these aspects map to the Behavioural-OR taxonomy of behaviour in/with/beyond models. The course will be especially valuable to OR students looking to critically apply their skills and explore possibilities in areas adjacent to OR, such as economics and operations management, where human behaviour is since long being modelled. The sessions will be interactive, and there will also be plenty of time for informal interactions and networking.
Description and value: System modelling
Nowadays, there is an increasing integration of methods from economics and psychology in simulation that allow more rigorous approaches to address behavioural issues. One of these approaches is the use of laboratory and field experiments of individual and group decision making concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. System Dynamics, as a simulation methodology, has been employed successfully as a behavioural experimental tool as well as to represent bounded decision making. Some researchers suggest that System Dynamics models are behavioural models of business systems which uncover intended rationality (theories in use) in business decision making. The two and a half days will cover the basic principles of System Dynamics, System Dynamics to model behaviour, useful approaches to perform research using System Dynamics together with other OR methods.
More information in this link: https://www.natcor.ac.uk/courses/