Curating knowledge, creating change:: University Knowledge Center, Kosovo national transition

A collaborative system design initiative at the University for Business and Technology in Kosovo aims to make local knowledge visible and to enhance local knowledge creation, within the university and throughout the country. Since its inception in 2015, design activities aimed to activate systems through modeling the global knowledge landscape, technology enabled systems, and human activity processes. Within the framework of Informed Systems, application of Informed Learning Theory and Information Experience Design (IXD) guided prototyping systems that informed building an institutional repository named the UBT Knowledge Center. The knowledge vision anticipates that sustained curation, organization, discovery, access, and usage processes will accelerate academic engagement, national development, and global visibility, over time and with practice to further theory-to-practice and practice-to-theory.

Risk-Based Resource Allocation for Collaborative System Design in a Distributed Environment

Risk analysis is important in system design because of its essential role in evaluating functional reliability and mitigating system failures. In this work, we aim at expanding existing risk modeling methods to collaborative system designs: specifically, to facilitate resource allocation among distributed stakeholders. Because of different perspectives and limited local information, inconsistent and/or incoherent risk assessments (such as different probability and confusing consequence evaluations) may occur among stakeholders, who are responsible for same or different risk components of a system. The discrepancies can become potential barriers in achieving consensus or acceptable disagreement for distributed resource allocation. Built upon our previous work, a risk-based distributed resource allocation methodology (R-DRAM) is developed to help a system manager allocate limited resources among collaborating stakeholders based on a cost-benefit measure of risk. Besides probability and consequence, two additional risk aspects, tolerance and hierarchy, are considered for system risk modeling in a collaborative/distributed environment. Given a total amount of resources to be allocated, the four risk aspects are combined to form the cost-benefit measure in a multiobjective optimization framework for achieving a desired risk reduction of a targeted system. An example is used to demonstrate the implementation process of the methodology. The preliminary investigation shows promise of the R-DRAM as a systematic and quantifiable approach in facilitating distributed resource allocation for collaborative system design.

Risk-Based Resource Allocation for Collaborative System Design in Distributed Environment

Risk is becoming an important factor in facilitating the resource allocation in engineering design because of its essential role in evaluating functional reliability and mitigating system failures. In this work, we aim at expanding existing quantitative risk modeling methods to collaborative system designs regarding resource allocation in a distributed environment, where an overlapped risk item can affect multiple stakeholders, and correspondingly be examined by multiple evaluators simultaneously. Because of different perspectives and limited local information, various evaluators (responsible for same or different components of a system), though adopting the same risk definition and mathematical calculation, can still yield unsatisfying global results, such as inconsistent probability and/or confusing consequence evaluations, which can then cause potential barriers in achieving agreement or acceptable discrepancies among different evaluators involved in the collaborative system design. Built upon our existing work, a Risk-based Distributed Resource Allocation Methodology (R-DRAM) is developed to help system manager allocate limited resource to stakeholders, and further to components of the targeted system for the maximum global risk reduction. Besides probability and consequence, two additional risk properties, tolerance and hierarchy, are considered for comprehensive systematic risk design. Tolerance is introduced to indicate the effective risk reduction, and hierarchy is utilized to model the comprehensive risk hierarchy. Finally a theoretical framework based on cost-benefit measure is developed for resource allocation. A case study is demonstrated to show the implementation process. The preliminary investigation shows promise of the R-DRAM in facilitating risk-based resource allocation for collaborative system design using a systematic and quantifiable approach in distributed environment.