Understanding the why and the how
The key to understanding a system's function and its behavior lies in the following aspects:
- Process: How do objects and information flow through the system's processes?
- Interaction: How do different entities or components of the system interact with each other?
- State: How does the state of an entity evolve over time?
- Causal: What are the causal relationships?
Each of these aspects is represented via diagrams. There are many diagramming conventions for process modeling, causal modeling, and interaction diagrams. These conventions are used differently in different domains. You can follow any of the conventions that you like or are already familiar with. In this book, we will follow certain conventions that are amenable to computational modeling. What that means is that these diagrams can be combined with data and turned into models that can be used for analysis. This will become important in the later stages of our...
