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Preface (2002 edition, continued…)
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It is a great pleasure to acknowledge the support and help of institutions and individuals in the production of this introduction to dynamic modeling. The TWINS project was supported financially by the KTI—the Federal Commission on Technology and Innovation—and our school. Our department was instrumental and supportive in many ways, helping us with infrastructure and project support.
There are several groups of individuals whose contributions have made the production of this book and the CBT materials possible. I would like to mention them in the “historical” order in which they added to this enterprise. For me it all started with the collaboration with Werner Maurer when we created a novel introductory physics course based on the physics of dynamical systems here at Winterthur. Second, there are Johannes Heeb, Martin Simon, and Karl Weber with whom I created a first graduate course on system dynamics modeling in the early 1990s. The materials produced for that course served in many ways as the seeds for what you are holding in your hands.
The third group of colleagues and friends consists of the TWINS “consortium” of authors and software engineers. Karl Weber is the author of Part 2 on the mathematical foundations of continuum physics, and Thomas Haller, Hansueli Schwarzenbach, and Guido Steiner have produced Part 3 on applications of finite element modeling in computational engineering. Possibly the most influential person in the project has been Guido Steiner, the TWINS software architect and engineer without whose expertise, insistence, patience, and tools we would not be where we are today. Also, I would like to thank Regula Keller who gave me valuable feedback on the contents of Chapter 5.
Finally, there are the three persons who have had the most direct influence on what is in this book: Karl Weber, Edy Schütz, and my wife, Robin Fuchs. Karl Weber let me have his lecture notes on mathematical aspects of system behavior from our graduate course which you can find in Chapter 4 (most of that chapter is a direct translation of these notes). Edy Schütz built all the experiments that have been used here, and he took the pictures, movies, and data presented in the CBT unit. Robin Fuchs translated Karl Weber’s notes, and she read and reread everything I wrote. To all of them I’d like to express my gratitude for their help and support.
Winterthur, August 2002
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