Dealing with next generation infrastructures academic programmes complexity induced resiliency assessment
by Behnido Y. Calida, Adrian V. Gheorghe, Resit Unal, Dan Vamanu
International Journal of Critical Infrastructures (IJCIS), Vol. 6, No. 4, 2010

Abstract: Academic departments in the field of critical societal infrastructures need to assess and upgrade their existing programmes and course offerings for several important reasons such as: 1) to regularly assess a curricula's structure; 2) to maintain competitiveness; 3) to assess the resiliency of a given academic programme; 4) to ensure its relevance to the fast changing environment and context among others. This paper aims to demonstrate the complexity-derived concept of 'resiliency' and how decision making applies to difficult decision making situations, with respect to the need of continuous improvement of graduate academic programmes. We use a graph theory-based complexity perspective as a tool to supplement decision making in assessing a department's course offering. Specifically, we can regard a graduate programme offering as a multi-component (many body) system consisting of its internal connectivity (i.e., combination of course offering as member interactions) defining structural complexity and as a source of vulnerability, hence resiliency. We explore an alternate methodology which combines the state-of-the-art in clustering text analysis as well as complexity-induced vulnerability quantitative methodologies recently used in performance quantification of complex systems.

Online publication date: Mon, 13-Dec-2010

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