Appendix A: A More Detailed Look at the Mathematics
As a vehicle for exploring the mathematics behind STELLA models in
more detail, we consider a familiar model - a water tub with a faucet
and a drain. Our goal here is to find what is called an anlaytical
solution to the question of how much is in the water tub at any time
given the basic system structure discussed above and represented
mathematically by the equation:
We also can specify the initial condition of
This is a classic type of first-order, linear differential
equation and the general strategy here is to separate the variables
W and t and then integrate both sides. If we do this,
the first equation we get is:
(2)
The problem with this is that you can't solve these integrals, so
we use a trick, which is to multiply both sides by -a, giving
us:
(3).
This is a good trick because now the left-hand side of the
equation has the form of:
This brings us to the point where we can solve both of the
integrals, giving:
(4)
We need to manipulate this a bit further so that we can express it
as a function of W. If we remember that
then we see that by aplying the natural exponential function to
both sides helps us toward our goal of expressing this equation as a
function of W:
(5)
Another trick here is that
ex+y =
exey
and since eC is a constant,
which we will call K, we can rewrite the right side of the
equation as:
Now, we need to find out what K is, and we get help is we
look at the initial condition, when t=0, at which time
W=W0. Since
e0=1, we see that at
t=0,
Substituting this in to equation (5) gives:
Now with just a bit more reordering, we will have an expression
for W that works for any time t. First we send b to the right
side of the equation, then divide both sides by a, giving:
(6).
This is our final solution. Having seen this model run, we know that starting at the intial value, the reservoir changes until it reaches a steady state. At that steady state, the inflow is equal to the outflow, which means:
This is a nice result since it tells us right away, before the
model even runs, the ending steady state value for the water tub.
You might ask, after going through the above math, why do we need
a program like STELLA to deal with the differential equations that
represent dynamic systems? Why not just use a simple calculator? The
reason is that once you move from a simple one-reservoir system to
more complex, larger systems, the analytic solution becomes rapidly
more complex and eventually impossible.
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