Complexity Induced Vulnerability Assessment: How Resilient are Our Academic Programs?

Abstract

Academic departments in the field of critical societal infrastructures need to assess and upgrade their existing programs 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 program, and (4) to ensure its relevance to the fast changing environment and context among others. This work builds on previous work to apply the previously developed resiliency assessment methodology to compare and ascertain some similarities and divergences in two Engineering Management programs, albeit in the same discipline but offered in different countries. A graph theory-based complexity perspective was used as a tool to make a comparative assessment of the course offerings between the two programs. Specifically, we can regard a Graduate program 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. Authors propose an alternate methodology that 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.