MATHEMATICAL MODEL FOR AIDING THE DECISION OF CHANGING THE CURRICULUM FOR HIGHER EDUCATION IN THE INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING DOMAIN

This work presents some aspects related to optimizing the curriculum for higher education, industrial engineering domain. The optimization was seen in this case from the perspective of the need to change or not to change it. Thus, a mathematical model was realized, based on the methods of fuzzy logic, which allows the analysis of the stability of the curriculum, in the context of the main disturbance factors.
Within this approach, stability refers to the period of time during which it is not necessary to modify the curriculum. The objective was set based on the fact that a higher education system in general and the curricula in particular are conservative structures, so any structural change may have unforeseen effects. Thus, the authors tried to realize for this situation a mathematical instrument for aiding the decision to change the curriculum or not.
Due to the topic tackled in the paper, concerning the optimization of the curricular area, the information available about the studied domain has a very low degree of precision, so that the decision-making process has a high difficulty degree. Thus, it was considered that the fuzzy logic is one of the methods that could allow the realizing of mathematical model that would assist and scientifically fundament the multi-criteria decision process in optimizing the curricula.
From the point of view of the input data, the mathematical model was based on information collected through questionnaire, the precision degree of which is dependent on the respondent's perception and objectivity. On the other hand, when elaborating the fuzzy-type multi-criteria decision model, one can rely on the experience of specialists in this domain, experience that can successfully replace the usage of high-complexity mathematical algorithms.
Also within this work, the authors proposed a dynamic simulation diagram that, in the hypothesis of knowing the variation laws for input parameters, allows the assessment of the curriculum's stability over time.