The Concept of Average Loop Impact as a System-Wide Measure of Feedback Dominance Analysis

In system dynamics, the concept of loop impact measures the effect of a feedback loop on the curvature in the behaviour of the stocks in the loop (Hayward & Boswell, 2014). It is a ratio measure of the acceleration imparted by the loop into a stock and can also be thought of as a ratio measure of the force exerted between adjacent stocks in the loop (Hayward & Roach, 2017). As such, a loop of n stocks is described by n impacts. Loop impact is used to examine regions of loop dominance in stock behaviour. Sometimes, it is helpful to present a dominance analysis for a complete system rather than an individual stock. This paper introduces the concept of average loop impact to explore such a system-wide loop dominance analysis.