Tutorial on business and market modeling to aid strategic decision making: system dynamics in perspective and selecting appropriate analysis approaches

System dynamics models have been used to address strategic questions in many hundreds of companies and government agencies around the world over the past 40 years, including a broad range of organizations in the transport sector. However, this technique remains less well known than other approaches among potential client organizations and within the simulation community. We provide a pithy tutorial on the system dynamics method and the modelling process, uses transport sector case examples to illustrate how such models have been valuable in practice, and compares key characteristics of system dynamics to discrete event simulation. We close with some guidance on factors to consider when selecting an analysis approach that is appropriate to the problem under study.