Title: Dealing with next generation infrastructures academic programmes complexity induced resiliency assessment

Authors: Behnido Y. Calida, Adrian V. Gheorghe, Resit Unal, Dan Vamanu

Addresses: Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23505, USA. ' Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23505, USA. ' Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23505, USA. ' 'Horia Hulubei' National Institute of Physics and Nuclear Engineering, 407 Atomistilor Street, Magurele, Bucharest, Romania

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.

Keywords: higher education; academic programmes; complexity induced vulnerability; resilience assessment; decision support systems; DSS; next generation infrastructures; graph theory; clustering text analysis; complex systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCIS.2010.037452

International Journal of Critical Infrastructures, 2010 Vol.6 No.4, pp.347 - 362

Published online: 13 Dec 2010 *

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