No abstract

Purpose -Ukraine has had to change in ten years from a strong centrally controlled communist economy to a market economy. It has not been successful. The purpose of this paper is to explain this failure from the complexity management point of view. Design/methodology/approach -This paper takes a cybernetic view of the attempts at Governance in Ukraine over its transition period. To diagnose the problem a novel approach based on the Viable Systems Methodology of Stafford Beer is used. Findings -Serious structural flaws are identified in the organisation of governance at the national level and it is shown how these inadequacies induced the formation of mutant abnormal strategies at the level of economic agents. Practical implications -Presents credible explanations of phenomena such as barter, corruption, growth of overdue debts and the existence of incentives (other than profit maximizing ones) which drive the behaviour of firms. Originality/value -There are many explanations of the same phenomena in contemporary economic literature but our explanations are based purely on an analysis of the complexity management tasks performed at each level of recursion: from a government to a firm. Moreover, the paper shows that the structural specificity of a system shapes the behavioural patterns of each systemic element, would it be a government body or a firm's management. Therefore, the notion of structural determinism allows one to state that structure defines the dynamics of any systemic change.

This article introduces non‐linear dynamics to assess the interactions in duopoly competition between two rivals. The generic competition is considered here to be the competition for quality between two consumer durable products. The authors have used a system dynamics approach to develop the model of interactions and simulate the behaviour over time. The outcomes of several hundred simulations have shown that the recognition and implementation lags in quality improvement strongly influence the qualitative behaviour of the system. When the speed of adaptation to customer demand reaches a certain value, a Hopf bifurcation occurs and the system converges into a limit cycle. Quasi‐periodicity and chaos emerge when further increasing the speed of the response. Instead of tending to equilibrium around an optimal quality value the model exhibits complex counter‐intuitive behaviours. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper investigates the dynamics of student enrolment in the Syrian private higher education sector. The paper adopts a system dynamics approach, to construct suitable simulation models that could be used to examine the complex and dynamic interactions between student flows, staff ratios and investments in plant and facilities. The study involved interviews with key university personnel, focus groups with university staff, a survey of student perceptions and personal observations of key departments at the university selected for the study. Further interviews were held with members of staff of all the other private universities in Syria. The simulation model developed in this study has provided insightful and meaningful exploration of data whose practical applicability is not necessarily restricted to the Syrian university, but broadly encompasses all educational sectors, whether private or public. The model designed in this research is a decision support system, one that is a flexible tool to design measures that might help to improve student enrolments. University management can use the simulation model to create different future scenarios, involving changes in student numbers, staff student ratios or investment in plant and facilities.

Abstract. The Capacitated Fixed Charge Location Problem (CFCLP) consists of selecting a set of facilities that must completely supply a set of customers at a minimum cost. The CFCLP is NP-hard thus solution methods are often obtained by using sophisticated techniques. However, if a set of facilities is known a priori then the CFCLP reduces to a transportation problem (TP). Although this can be used to derive solutions by randomly selecting sufficient facilities to be fixed open and noting any cost improvements, it is perceived as a poor technique that does not guarantee solutions near the optimal. This paper presents an adaptive sampling algorithm using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). We hypothesize that random selection of facilities using ACO will generate at least near-optimal solutions for the CFCLP. Computational results for a series of standard benchmark problems are presented which appear to confirm this hypothesis.