Design of Causal Coupling Patterns Supporting Causal Modeling and Flow Modeling in the System Dynamics Methodology

System dynamics (SD) is a well-known methodology for analyzing the structure and the behavior of business systems and the environment. The utility of SD has been proven in numerous cases. However, decision makers have reservations using SD to support their decision processes. The reasons can be a) decision makers have problems to design a causal model under given time constraints (aspect of methodology complexity and methodical support) and b) the constructed causal and flow model do not offer adequate structure and behavior consistency (aspect of model quality). Furthermore, there are high demands on the causal and flow model due to using it for the description of the behavior of the real system in terms of differential equations. This paper introduces causal coupling patterns using the task concept of KOSIOL (cf. Kosiol, 1976) to simplify causal modeling and to derive the corresponding flow models in order to increase the acceptance and the model quality of SD models.