Compositional Modeling with Stock and Flow Diagrams

DOI10.4204/EPTCS.380.5arXiv2205.08373OpenAlexW4385342865MaRDI QIDQ6150145FDOQ6150145

Evan Patterson, Nathaniel D. Osgood, John Baez, Author name not available (Why is that?), Xiaoyan Li

Publication date: 5 March 2024

Published in: Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Stock and flow diagrams are widely used in epidemiology to model the dynamics of populations. Although tools already exist for building these diagrams and simulating the systems they describe, we have created a new package called StockFlow, part of the AlgebraicJulia ecosystem, which uses ideas from category theory to overcome notable limitations of existing software. Compositionality is provided by the theory of decorated cospans: stock and flow diagrams can composed to form larger ones in an intuitive way formalized by the operad of undirected wiring diagrams. Our approach also cleanly separates the syntax of stock and flow diagrams from the semantics they can be assigned. We consider semantics in ordinary differential equations, although others are possible. As an example, we explain code in StockFlow that implements a simplified version of a COVID-19 model used in Canada.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.08373

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Computer science (68-XX)

Cites Work

• Julia: A Fresh Approach to Numerical Computing
• Decorated Cospans
• A compositional framework for reaction networks
• Structured Cospans
• Categorical Data Structures for Technical Computing

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