During interactions, system actors may face up misunderstandings when their local states contain inconsistent data about the same fact. Misunderstandings in interactions are likely to reduce interactivity performances (deviation or deadlock) or even affect overall system behavior. In this paper, we characterize misunderstandings in interactions between system actors (that may be human users or system agents) in interactive adaptive systems. To deal with such misunderstandings and ensure state consistency, we present an agent-based architecture and a scenario structuring approach. The system includes several agents devoted to scenario unfolding, plot adaptation and consistency management. Scenario structuring is based on the notion of a situation that is an elementary building block dividing the interactions between systems' actors into contextual scenes. This pattern supports not only scenario execution but consistency management as well. In order to organize and control interactions, the situation contextualizes interactions and activity of the system's actors. It also includes prevention and tolerance agent-based mechanisms to deal with the misunderstandings and their causes. We validate our consistency management mechanisms using Uppaal simulation and provide some experimental results to show the effectiveness of our approach on an online distance learning case study.
PurposeThis paper aims to examine the economic efficiency of Vietnamese 172 higher education (HE) institutions within the 2012–2016 inclusive period through the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. The authors also compare public and private, multidisciplinary and mono-disciplinary, non-autonomy and autonomy, non-international and international HE Institutions’ efficiency.Design/methodology/approachThis study derived from an unique dataset from the Ministry of Education and Training (MOET) of Vietnam. The data set comprises financial and academic annual reports of higher education institutions (HEIs). The authors achieved totally 204 Vietnamese HEIs, and the sample for analysis is 172 after the elimination of missing units, accounting for 84.3% entire of Vietnamese HEIs. The authors estimate the efficiency scores relying on these selected inputs and outputs by using the DEA method.FindingsOverall, HEIs in Vietnam decreased their operational efficiency during the 2012–2016. It also seems that public universities operate in the absence of market mechanism so that they tend to be less efficient than their counterparts in private sector. Based on our analysis, the authors observe that the HEIs including the international programmes have higher efficiency scores rather than these without international programmes.Originality/valueThis study contributes to the theoretical aspects as follows. First, it enriches the existent efficiency literature on HE using the DEA approach. This stands out among similar studies in Vietnam in terms of duration (from 2012–2016) and data size (172 entities). Second, the research is the first to examine HEIs in terms of disciplinary (mono or multi-disciplinary) and autonomy (autonomous and non-autonomous), internalization (international programmes). These aspects have been silent in previous studies of HEIs in Vietnam.
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