Thursday, August 8, 2013
101C, Minneapolis Convention Center
Bernard C. Patten, University of Georgia
Open systems are partially interconnected sets of open components, with a boundary, state variables, and boundary inputs and outputs. The portions of the components' environments lying within the system are its environs, in two orientations: output environs driven by boundary inputs, and input environs traced backward from boundary outputs. Both are partition elements of the intra-system flow–storage network, describable within the mathematics of the system's dynamical description. Environ analysis has five principal components: Pathway analysis, Throughflow analysis, Storage analysis, Utility analysis, and Distributed Control analysis. Each is described and its principal ecologically significant results highlighted.