Birth of a System - London Cycle Hire

People in London can't have failed to notice the introduction of a new transport system lately - the Cycle Hire scheme. At the time of writing it's roughly a month into operations. For the uninitiated, there are roughly 400 docking stations around town, each housing up to 20-30 bikes. Registered users present their dongles, unhook a bike and pedal off. At the other end, the bike is re-docked, and, in a database somewhere, a small charge is incurred. (More intro, Guardian, July 2010)

Some things I've noticed, and some questions.:

It's obviously a multi-element system: Bikes, Docks, Terminals, Back End Data, Billing, Logistics. It's additionally part of TfL's great big system-of-systems. It's got the Mayor's Office paw prints on it, but clearly has been in the works for years. It couldn't have happened, without Paris and a few other prototypes. Expect to see more in big and small cities round the world soon.

There are sprawling requirements everywhere, not completely understood. Here, for example, is a story about an odd feature of the database that caused the owners to back-pedal on a particular function, the multi-key account. Is the development cycle capable of adapting to new, or recently clarified, requirements? My guess is that, oops, the database contract has been and gone, and this feature will sink, rather than be implemented properly.

The initial users are enthusiastic, communicative, and alive to the possibilities it offers. Has this resource been tapped into? The forumites all want to talk to TfL and Serco (for it is they) but I suspect the drawbridge is up.

Data! There are plenty of feeds that allow the growth of applications (and, of course, Apps) to entertain and inform the users. Here, for example, is Oliver O'Brien's visualisation of real-time Dock status. (Oliver is a GIS nerd at UCL, but I don't otherwise know him). Here's another of his, showing daily stats, for example. Note how system availalbility is about capacity of both Bikes and Docks at each end of the prospective journey. Unlike a little French town (Lyon? Paris?), London's scheme is being used a lot, in two daily peaks, by edge-to-centre commuters. Machines and Holes are both at a premium at critical times. Has all this been modelled?

The contractors and operators aren't saying much for now, other than "we are working on the best way to do things". Do they mean us?

Originally Posted at Systems Engineering on KTN _connect.

System Dynamics on Drugs

So the UK's own war on drugs has failed?

The government's chief drugs adviser has said the UK is "floundering" in its attempts to control the online mephedrone market.

more (audio report, BBC News 19 July, 2010).

He's not the only one :

Enforcement officers, such as police and customs, have admitted the UK drugs market will not be eradicated, an independent report will reveal today.

The study, by the UK Drug Policy Commission, concludes that traditional enforcement actions such as arrests and drug seizures have "no apparent long-term" impact on reducing supply.

In some cases, enforcement even exacerbates the problem such as leading to turf wars or pushing markets to more sensitive areas such as outside schools or residential areas.

rest of article (Daily Telegraph, 30 Jul 2009)

Meanwhile, Lisbon has "legalised" its drug policy, but gets clean :

But the seedy dark alleyway was now sunshine-filled with a pretty boutique on the left and a view over the red roofs of Lisbon on the right.

I cannot pretend that the clean-up of the old city is all down to the decriminalisation of drugs. Dealing is after all still done by criminal gangs.

But for me, that street at least is not a place to be afraid of any more.

article (From Our Own Correspondent, BBC, 18 June 2009)

There are many, many examples of how policies (e.g. on the legal status of certain drugs), operational choices (policing of drug use, and in particular, whether to have war or not) and effects (health, disease, crime) are distinctly non-linear, perhaps even counterintuitive. You can see how safe and crime free were the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, quite recently, to see how the US War on Drugs has been progressing (Jamaica is a key, er, logistics hub for the US cocaine market).

Drugs policy is an emotive issue, involving concepts like sin, personal responsibility and punishment, as a well as the usual tribulations of measuring effectiveness in complex situations. That might explain why the policy drivers seem perversely immune to the realisation that a complex systems reacts to its environment, including attempts to control it.

System Dynamics is a helpful modelling tool in this area, since it's able to model the feedback between a social system (the drug users) and its environment (the laws and policing).

System Dynamics is a methodology for studying and managing complex feedback systems, such as one finds in business and other social systems.

System Dynamics Society, Jan 2009

There are quite a few System Dynamics case studies in exactly this area, in turns out. As as a modelling technique is especially useful for teasing out cause, effect and, potentially, optimal policy choices. Here are a couple of examples and articles:

Heroin-Crime SD model (MIT, 1997) [PDF]

Dynamics of the Drug-Crime Relationship, (Helen White & D. M. Gordon, NCJRS, 2000) [PDF]

Technology Management

The best things in life are complex.

Interesting technology is no exception, which is why UCL is focussing on Technology Management.