The following guidelines should be followed when preparing your
project proposal. You may either study and simulate a specific
system of interest or write a tutorial paper on some topic
in systems and simulation. Either way your proposal must be 
approved by the instructor. 

YOU MAY NOT REPEAT PREVIOUS WORK. HOWEVER, IF APPROPRIATE
YOU MAY SIGNIFICANTLY EXTEND A MODEL OR PAPER.

Use your textbooks to find examples of case studies. This
will put you in the right frame of mind to be creative
in modelling your own system.

Examine the models at:
http://globalchange.umich.edu/webprojects/gc1examples.html

These are similar to the quality you hope to achieve.

Write
a paragraph describing the system you wish to model and why it is
of interest and important to you. List 2 or 3 questions about the system that interest you most.

Explain why you feel the system can be modelled using
the methods of the course and SIMLAB (or another
computer tool you are planning to use)
    Are there quantifiable variables?
    Is the system reducible to a model? 
Are there repeating patterns that
may be arising from system structure? 

    Name, define and describe variables (recall that they should
    be dynamic and quantifiable nouns) that you feel are relevant to
    answering the questions you have posed in 1 above.
    You should feel free to brainstorm here and state any assumptions that you are making.

    Do not attempt to do a full diagram of the system
    at this point, but DO try to define what may be the
    central loop of the system and one additional loop. 
    For example, the central loop may show how the system is SUPPOSED to work and additional loops can explore what is out of whack.

    Are there any concepts or models, already presented in the course  that
    you feel may be particularly relevant to your system? Such things
    might be the  population models, information theory, mutual
    information, correlation coefficient, regression, statistics.

Follow the number one law of system modelling: HAVE FUN!

In this project you will eventually write a 10-15 page paper
on some system's topic. The paper should be written in an 
educational format so that a student taking a future course
could learn from it. You may also like to write some
exercises.
Follow the following guidelines for your proposal writeup:

Choose a topic and write a few sentences of why that topic
is of interest to you and others. Possible topics include
(but are not limited to): cellular automata, complexity,
information theory, symmetry, finite state machines, equation
writing, adaptive systems, population models and analysis,
stochastic systems, artificial life, systems equilibrium and
identification, chaos theory.

List at least 3 or 4 references that you will be using to assist your writeup.
These references may be Webpages (there are many pages on systems on the
Web) - provided that you copy a page from each
URL and attach to your writeup.

List 5-10 subtopics under the main topic that you intend to cover
and which references will assist with those subtopics.

Pick one of the subtopics above and break down into at least 3
subsubtopics.

Order the topics and subtopics above to create a preliminary outline.

Follow the number one law of paper writing: HAVE FUN!