Within that paper, Richmond mused on the study of system dynamics: "If this stuff really is so great, then why hasn't the field 'taken off'?" Steve Peterson, a colleague of Richmond's, reflected after his death in 2002 that Richmond held the belief that modeling was a tool everyone should be using and that that notion was reflected in Richmond's work. He quoted a 1994 paper in which Richmond described STELLA as "quite unique, quite powerful, and quite broadly useful as a way of thinking and or learning. It's also capable of being quite transparent–leveraging the way we learn biology, manage our businesses, or run our personal lives".
STELLA's approach to modeling systems shares some similarities with a precursor, the DYNAMO simulation language. DYNAMO explicitly defined "stocks" (reservoirs) and "flows" (inputs and outputs) as key variables in a system, a vocabulary that STELLA shares. Within STELLA, users are presented with a graphical user interface in which they may create graphical models of a system using four fundamentals: stocks, flows, converters, and connectors. Relationships between converters (which convey transforming variables) and other elements may be drawn with converters. Users are able to input values for stocks, flows, and converters (including a variety of built-in functions). STELLA does not differentiate between external and intermediate variables within a system; all of them are represented with converters.
STELLA runs one window at a time, meaning that only one model can be run at any given moment. The program's native file formats are denoted either by an .stm, .stmx, .itm, or .itmx filename extension. STELLA also uses the emerging XML-based standard for storing models, XMILE. In 2012, two researchers released StellaR, software which can translate STELLA models into the R programming language.
Because of its simplicity relative to more complex modeling languages, STELLA has been cited as a useful tool in educational settings. Richmond derisively viewed most education as "assimilating content" and proposed systems thinking as a remedy to this.
In 1987, High Performance Systems released a guide to STELLA encouraging its use in academic settings and numerous textbooks have been published that teach modeling and systems thinking using the software. Sample exercises with STELLA include recreating the Daisyworld model, simulating the Easter Island population crash, and modeling the protagonist's motivation throughout William Shakespeare's Hamlet.
The software is also used in research settings. Among other projects, researchers have used STELLA to apply Hubbert peak theory to the Chinese coal supply, to model atrazine dynamics within agricultural lands, and to simulate the interactions between marine macroinvertebrates.
isee systems markets an identical software targeted at business consumers under the name iThink (previously STELLA for Business). iThink models have been applied to a variety of systems including manufacturing lines, hospital waste in developing nations, coordination between an emergency room and hospital beds, and competition in the home video market.
Costanza, R. (February 1987). "Simulation Modeling on the Macintosh Using STELLA". BioScience. 37 (2): 129–132. doi:10.2307/1310367. JSTOR 1310367. S2CID 56217107.
https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=iss_pub
Carter, J. (October 1998). "Two Visual Programming Languages for Simulation Modeling: Stella 5.0 and Modelmaker 3.0". Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 79 (4): 237–239. doi:10.2307/20168276. JSTOR 20168276. S2CID 62582639.
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Bossel 1994, p. 213. - Bossel, H. (1994). Modeling and Simulation. Wellesley, MA: A K Peters. doi:10.1007/978-3-663-10822-1. ISBN 978-1-56881-033-1. https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-663-10822-1
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Peterson, S. (July 2003). Barry Richmond, System Dynamics and Public Policy (PDF). 21st System Dynamics Conference. New York City. pp. 1–14. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 1, 2013. Retrieved February 29, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20130301012759/http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2003/proceed/PAPERS/417.pdf
Peterson, S. (July 2003). Barry Richmond, System Dynamics and Public Policy (PDF). 21st System Dynamics Conference. New York City. pp. 1–14. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 1, 2013. Retrieved February 29, 2016. https://web.archive.org/web/20130301012759/http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2003/proceed/PAPERS/417.pdf
Bossel 1994, p. 213. - Bossel, H. (1994). Modeling and Simulation. Wellesley, MA: A K Peters. doi:10.1007/978-3-663-10822-1. ISBN 978-1-56881-033-1. https://doi.org/10.1007%2F978-3-663-10822-1
de Souza, R.; Huynh, R.; Chandrashekar, M.; Thevenard, D. (October 1996). A comparison of modelling paradigms for manufacturing line. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1996. Beijing. pp. 1253–1258. doi:10.1109/ICSMC.1996.571288.
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Taffe, W. J. (March 1991). Simulation and modelling with Stella: a general education course. 22nd SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. San Antonio, TX. pp. 87–91. doi:10.1145/107005.107021.
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Carter, J. (October 1998). "Two Visual Programming Languages for Simulation Modeling: Stella 5.0 and Modelmaker 3.0". Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America. 79 (4): 237–239. doi:10.2307/20168276. JSTOR 20168276. S2CID 62582639.
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Richmond 2013, pp. 9–11. - Richmond, B. (2013). An Introduction to Systems Thinking, STELLA. Lebanon, NH: isee systems. ISBN 978-0-9704921-1-1. https://archive.org/details/introductiontosy00slis
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