You can find different articles that describe modeling approaches on our site. I recommend you to learn it in pare with tutorials on System Dynamics, Agent-Based Modeling and Enterprise Library. These tutorials can be found in AnyLogic Help and on our site too (http://www.xjtek.com/support/download/documentation/). One of the ways to learn about AnyLogic and modeling approaches is to participate in XJ training. More information about dates and training program can be found on this site (http://www.xjtek.com/trainings/upcoming_trainings/) Regarding the books we have the following situation: SD: You can find a lot of useful information and examples on System Dynamics in an excellent textbook by John Sterman “Business Dynamics”. I am not sure that some other books are needed after reading this one. AB: Unfortunately, all books on Agent-Based modeling are too "academic", full of toy cellular automata or "moving turtles" models are pretty much useless for practitioners. There are some good papers published though - see e.g. proceedings of System Dynamics conference in the past 2-3 years. I would recommend starting learning AB with papers on our site (http://www.xjtek.com/support/download/papers/), especially those which have Andrei Borshchev as an author. DE: DE modeling can be covered by flowchart approach, so it does not require a lot of theory… just practice.

I think that, for rigorous and fruitful AnyLogic learning , the student should have a good knowledge of : Mathematics: - Differential equations: solution and numerical solution ideas, initial value problem, numerical methods, ... - Control Theory: state space model, transfer function model, nonlinear systems, controller design... - Statistics: aleatory numbers, probability distributions, queue theory, stochastic processes, Montecarlo method, ... Informatics: - Java 6 - Statecharts (David Harel) Simulation: - Stochastic simulation - GPSS or Simscript or Arena ... I have some experience in teaching Process Automation by using AnyLogic and think that it is a very good tool to put in practice and students remember a lot "idle" knowledge. For this purpose I am using a collection of slides (in spanish) about those topics.