Industrial Dynamics Forrester 1961 Trial Systems And
Offered a scholarship to an agricultural college, he decided that the life bucolic was not for him and instead enrolled at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1939.After graduation he went to MIT, where he worked with Gordon Brown, the servomechanism pioneer who later became MIT’s dean of engineering. Growing up on a remote ranch offered many opportunities to get his hands dirty finding practical solutions to important problems, such as building a wind-powered generator to provide the first electricity at the ranch. In this book, Forrester presented models of industrial systems and used them.Jay developed an early interest in electricity, tinkering with batteries, doorbells, and telegraphs. The past and immediate future of industrial dynamics divides into three periods: Period One, 1956-1961, Structural Concepts and Steady-State Dynamics.was followed in 1961 by Forresters book Industrial Dynamics (Forrester 1961).
The ASCA was originally envisioned as an analog computer, but Jay realized that the nonlinear dynamics of aircraft could not be realized with analog components and began to explore the potential for digital simulation.He visited the computing centers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, where he met John von Neumann and J. He directed the Airplane Stability and Control Analyzer (ASCA) project, aimed at developing flight simulators to test new aircraft designs. During that mission, the Lexington participated in retaking the Marshall Islands and survived a torpedo strike.Concurrent with these efforts Jay was associate director of MIT’s Servomechanisms Laboratory (1940–51). Though a civilian he volunteered, when the fleet was ordered to sea, to stay aboard to ensure that the servo—and thus the ship’s radar—worked.
Core memory—cheap, stable, reliable—became the industry standard for decades and flew to the moon in the computers on the Apollo missions.Whirlwind became the central element of the SemiAutomatic Ground Environment (SAGE) system and the first computer produced in volume. To solve the storage problem, in 1949 Jay invented and won the patent for coincident-current magnetic core memory. Memory cost $1 per bit per month. Computer memory quickly emerged as a major bottleneck in the development of Whirlwind. These visits convinced Jay that ASCA would be based on digital computation, a bold decision given that digital computers at the time were far too slow and unreliable to meet the requirements of ASCA.Jay led the development of the Whirlwind computer, for years the only machine fast enough and reliable enough for real-time tasks such as simulation of complex dynamical systems like aircraft or numeric control of machine tools.
Jay’s colleagues and students during this period went on to major accomplishments: Robert Everett, his second in command on the Whirlwind project, went on to lead the MITRE Corporation, and student Kenneth Olson cofounded the Digital Equipment Corporation.For his pioneering innovations in digital computing Jay was elected to the NAE in 1967. This demanding real-time application required high reliability, an immense challenge since each of the several dozen SAGE centers contained about 80,000 vacuum tubes.Jay’s legendary drive for quality led him to improve the design and manufacturing processes, making SAGE one of the most reliable command-and-control systems ever built: when the last center was decommissioned in 1983, the systemwide uptime over two and a half decades of service was 99.8 percent. The computers in each center processed the data and computed flight plan vectors for interceptor aircraft and missiles.
449).Jay believed that a manager’s role is not only captain of the ship but also designer of the ship. The work launched the field of supply chain management, today a core discipline in operations research and management.Jay’s unique contribution, detailed in his 1961 book Industrial Dynamics (Productivity Press), was to develop concepts about systems, feedback, control, and dynamics that were previously restricted to engineering and physical contexts into a rigorous yet practical method for what he called “enterprise design… management policies and organizational structures that lead to greater success” (p. He saw how these decisions interacted in a system consisting of multiple, nonlinear feedbacks to generate unwanted, costly fluctuations. Rather than attribute fluctuations to exogenous events, he saw the appliance business as a system of interacting units in which managers in each link in the supply chain responded in a locally rational fashion to the incentives and information they faced. Observing how the different departments were run, Jay learned how managers, from the retail level through distribution channels and in factories, responded to the information locally available to them as they tried to control their piece of the organization. In a memo that year, “Dynamic Models of Economic Systems and Industrial Organizations,” he described his vision for the synthesis of feedback control theory with digital simulation to understand and improve complex human systems.Jay’s first dynamic model explained the large fluctuations in production, inventories, headcount, and profit in the appliance division of General Electric.
In the meantime, long delays in the response of the economy and technology to resource depletion and environmental degradation could lead human activity to overshoot the planet’s “carrying capacity.” As he put it,"Attacking symptoms rather than underlying causes will be futile…. Growth of population and material production on a finite planet must eventually cease. Developments since have only underscored the importance of Jay’s insights. His book World Dynamics (Wright-Allen Press, 1971) again provoked enormous controversy—and launched the field of global modeling. Although it was enormously controversial at the time, subsequent events have shown his analysis to be largely correct.In 1970, after attending a meeting of the Club of Rome, Jay created a model of the interactions of population, industrialization, natural resources, and pollution.
Forrester Chair in Management at MIT in recognition of the vital role of Jay’s work in the success of IBM.Jay formally retired in 1989, an event he said “had no effect whatsoever on my work.” He dedicated much of his time thereafter to catalyzing the education of young people in the principles of systems, leading to the introduction of dynamic modeling in schools throughout the United States. Jay’s work in this area was recognized with many awards, including induction into the International Federation of Operational Research Societies’ Hall of Fame and many honorary degrees.
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