The relationship between structure and behavior is central to system dynamics, but effective tools required to understand that relationship still elude us. The current state of the art in the field of loop dominance analysis relies on either practitioner intuition and experience or complex algorithmic manipulation in the form of eigenvalue analysis or pathway participation metrics. This article presents a new and distinct numeric method based on a different measure, the loop score, to determine the contribution of a loop to a model's behavior at each instant in time. This allows us to discover the origin of model behavior. The method was inspired by observations of the patterns in the changes of the values of variables during simulations and has been tested and refined using empirical evaluation on a variety of models. The method also offers a promising approach to the visualization and aggregation of simulation results.

中文翻译：

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使用“至关重要的循环”方法了解模型行为

结构与行为之间的关系对于系统动力学至关重要，但是了解这种关系所需的有效工具仍然使我们望而却步。环路支配性分析领域的当前技术水平依赖于从业者的直觉和经验，或者依赖于特征值分析或路径参与度量形式的复杂算法。本文介绍了一种基于不同度量（循环得分）的新颖独特的数值方法，用于确定循环在每个时间点对模型行为的贡献。这使我们能够发现模型行为的起源。该方法的灵感来自于模拟过程中变量值变化的模式观察，并已通过对各种模型的经验评估进行了测试和完善。