This paperwork will present a new method for conception and optimization of the curriculum for university level technical education, focused upon Industrial Engineering domain.
As a first step of the work, the Industrial Engineering concept will be defined, based upon the requirements of the labor force market. The definition domain will be narrowed by taking into consideration only the machine building industry (machine building technology, machine tools and related specializations).
The proposed method is a competency driven one, which will use the fuzzy logic techniques as decision system.
A set of questionnaires will be issued and transmitted to companies from the machine building industry, asking them to assess every competencies from a comprehensive list. The list will include the competencies an industrial engineer should posses and the companies will also be asked to include and asses new ones if necessary.
Every discipline taken into consideration for inclusion in the curriculum will be linked with a given number of specific competencies, assessed by means of the questionnaires.
In order to select the initial set of disciplines the curricula for industrial engineers in the field of machine building from a large number of universities from Europe, USA and other parts of the world will be analyzed.
Based upon the results of the questionnaires and the results of the analyze, a curricular area will be proposed. A set of fuzzy models will be built, one for each discipline from the curricular area.
A fixed number of input variables will be chosen and the output variable will the necessity of inclusion in the curricular area (percentage). The input variables will be the competencies assessed by means of questionnaires. By means of a fuzzyfication process, each linguistic variables from questionnaires will be expressed by means of membership functions and through a defuzzyfication process, its influence upon the output will be expressed by a crisp number.
For example, if in the questionnaire the competency “ability to make technical drawings” is linked, together with some other ones with the discipline of “machine design”, a linguistic assessment as “the ability to make technical drawings is very important / medium important / less important / insignificant” will be taken into consideration by the proposed fuzzy engine and will increase / decrease the degree of inclusion for the above mentioned discipline.
Each discipline which will obtain a degree of inclusion greater than 75% will be included in the curricular area. One of the contribution of the research team will be to chose the number and the nature of the input variables (competencies will be a first chose, but others could also be chosen). Another contributions will be to establish the membership function for each variable and also to establish and edit the fuzzy rules for each fuzzy model.
The fuzzy model for each discipline will allow the user to interactively change the value of each input variable, taking into consideration any change which may occur and to evaluate the output.