Abstract:

The academic management is confronted with a series of new challenges in uncertain times, such as in the context of the resources administration impacted by the external factor of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Universities are institutions that offer their resources (classrooms, laboratory rooms) for the purpose of education and academic performance. They are generally built on the model of local centralized service offering points, which implies that a number of students and professors gather in the same place to conduct educational activities. Thus, the regular activities expose faculties to a high risk, due to the fact that the new coronavirus has a human-to-human transmission that occurs via airborne respiratory droplets and indirect contact, via contaminated surfaces, making educational environments potential promoters of the disease.

We lean our solution to the aforementioned problem on the adaptation of a set of software services initially conceived to facilitate the navigation within the campus based on a set of criteria, including the accessibility for persons with special locomotory needs. In the current situation, we worked on the transformation of these services to serve for protecting the faculty’s stakeholders and determine navigation ways based on a new criterion that is avoiding the creation of crowded spaces or passages. Technically, this consists in the development of RESTful web services built on top of an HTTP platform. The context in which the proposed services are developed is a faculty that has administrative rooms, laboratory and office rooms that function based on a schedule. The schedule is the prime indicator when gatherings can be formed, thus increasing the risk of virus spreading. The risk will be greater in the specific locations where gatherings are formed in a predictive manner, based on the schedule. A navigation path is used to access any of these resources, but this navigation path could be altered by other stakeholders moving to other resources, because multiple classes can be held in different locations at the same time. Thus, the navigation path computed by our services should minimize the risk of exposure.

Our proposal is a system that includes the above mentioned web services that provide functionalities in order to:
(i) manage specific locations inside the faculty, such as entries, hallways, rooms;
(ii) indicate the navigation path towards a resource with minimized risk, which updates in real time based on the actions of other stakeholders;
(iii) simulate the risk based on the schedule of the faculty’s resources;
(iv) indicate the actions that lower the risk of resources such as cleaning and prolonged room ventilation.

Thus, the paper addresses a management problem in a community that must minimize epidemic risks, with various stakeholders that behave in different ways, and it proposes a system to control the interactions between them. It also presents an example based on a space configured for our faculty needs.

Keywords:

Academic management, web services, pandemic.