A stock is a bucket into which a something can accumulate or be withdrawn from. What the bucket holds is specific to your model; it could be water, or money, or even deer. You can set an initial value or level for the stock that it will take on at the start of the simulation. The initial value may be a simple number or a more complex mathematical expression.

Stocks are flexible. For instance, they can hold people, water, or viruses.

One example of the use of a stock would be to simulate a reservoir. Water is added to the reservoir by rivers and then released from the reservoir for irrigation or consumption. Another example of a good use of a stock would be the population of a city. People migrate to the city and emigrate from the city. In this case the units for the stock would in numbers of people.

The value of a stock – or any other valued primitive for that matter – can be referenced in equations using a pair of square brackets around the primitive’s name. For instance, if you had a stock called My Lake, you could obtain twice its value in an equation using:

[My Lake] * 2

The standard stock is in effect one large mixing bowl. Materials are added directly to the bowl, completely mixed with the existing bowl contents, and then removed from the bowl. For most cases this is the desired behavior. For some cases, however, users will desire slightly different behavior. For instance, imagine we are attempting to simulate an aging population. One way to simulate this would be to create a number of different stocks representing different age groups. For instance, we could have a Young stock, a Middle-aged stock, and an Old stock. Each time step we could transfer a fixed fraction of the young people to the middle-aged stock, and a fraction of the middle-aged people to the old person stock. We could simulate births by adding new individuals to the young stock, and deaths by removing people from the old stock. This would work pretty well if we had a population where the demographics remained roughly constant. Let’s assume, however, that we encounter a shock like the baby-boom generation in the United States. This shock would add a large number of people to the young stock instantly. In reality these individuals should age a large number of years before they are passed on to the middle-aged stock. Unfortunately, because we are moving a fixed fraction of the young people to the middle-aged stock each period, the shock is felt in the middle-age population immediately. This is not the desired behavior and will lead to incorrect demographic modeling.

We can attempt to remedy this by increasing the number of stocks. Instead of three, we could have six, or 30, or 1000. The more stocks we added, the more accurate our modeling. Creating such a large number of stocks, however, would be infeasible! Fortunately, Insight Maker allows you to convert a stock into a conveyor stocks, thereby creating a theoretically unlimited number of sub compartments within one stock.

Conveyor stock With fixed delay

Conveyor stocks are special in that there are two types of values you can access. The regular single bracket notation gets you the value of material that has exited the converter. A new double bracket notation shows the total amount of material including that still in transit.

Exited Number In Stock = [Population]

Total Number In Stock = [[Population]]