Generalizations of the Lotka-Volterra Population Ecology Model: Theory, Simulation, and Applications

Abstract

Social scientists have attempted in vain to explain and predict the social phenomenon and particularly the behavior of the social system, with the unsatisfactory result that they were not so successful in terms of the accuracy of the prediction that they started to look into chaos theory. Several authors presented the ability of even the most simple predator-prey models to yield damped and explosive oscillations as well as stable limit cycles. Lotka and Volterra suggested models of population dynamics incorporating interpopulation competition. In this paper, biological population ecology model, especially Lotka-Volterra model is applied to organizations and social systems at large. This paper demonstrates the power of merging system dynamics with population ecology models to assess the sensitivity to initial conditions. The dynamical properties of the generalized Lotka-Volterra model were made by simulations using the Ithink software. The implications of using simulation in the analysis of chaotic behavior are presented.