Experimentation with a System Dynamics Based Interactive Learning Environment A Case Study of Accessibility of Norwegian Municipalities Websites

Accessibility of Norwegian Municipalities Websites: A Decision Support Tool

Access to public websites is crucial to assure equal opportunities for all citizens to participate in society. Although, a range of studies to analyse the accessibility of websites have been carried out, we have not been able to find any study evaluating the effect of managerial decisions on the accessibility of websites. This paper presents a demonstrator simulation model, built using System Dynamics methodology. The model focuses on accessibility of Norwegian Municipal websites, and is intended to be used as a decision support tool, mainly for managers responsible for website development and maintenance. To build the underlying model we have used information collected from in-depth interv…

A Survey of Current Measurement Methods for eGovernment User-Satisfaction

A survey on eGovernment user-satisfaction measurement methods was conducted to enable a comparison among them and to facilitate a discussion on good practices. The collected information is related to the methodology properties, tools, followed practices, implementation stage and challenges. The main findings are that the surveyed methods rarely refer to any established relevant standards, they are not regularly updated, and most of them do not have an open process for maintenance. We also note that software vendors are mostly not included in the intended group of users of the measurement results. A revision of methods and their maintenance processes can increase their accountability and ena…

Analyzing Cascading Effects in Interdependent Critical Infrastructures

International audience; Critical Infrastructures (CIs) are resources that are essential for the performance of society, including its economy and its security. Large-scale disasters, whether natural or man-made, can have devastating primary (direct) effects on some CI and significant indirect effects (cascading effects) on other CIs, because CIs are interconnected and depend on each other’s services. Recent work by Laugé et al. expressed the dependency values among CIs as dependency matrices for various durations of the primary CI failure. For better preparedness and mitigation of CI failures knowledge of the weak points in CI interdependencies is crucial. To this effect, we have developed …

Are Cities Aware Enough? A Framework for Developing City Awareness to Climate Change

Cities are growing and becoming more complex, and as they continue to do so, their capacity to deal with foreseen and unforeseen challenges derived from climate change has to adapt accordingly. In the last decade, an effort has been made to build city resilience and improve cities' capacity to respond to, recover from and adapt to climate change. However, certain city stakeholders' lack of proactive behavior has resulted in less effective city resilience-building strategies. In this sense, the importance of developing stakeholders&rsquo

Shifting to climate change aware cities to facilitate the city resilience implementation

Abstract Climate change (CC) is one of the most urgent threats to modern societies, having direct and indirect consequences on the rapid growth of urban areas. Cities are attempting to both reduce their impact on the environment and build resilience to be able to face the irreversible effects of CC through plans and strategies. However, barriers, such as the fact that cities are complex systems and the uncertainty posed by CC have led to less engaged and committed city stakeholders, which have hampered the operationalisation of city resilience. In this context, developing city stakeholders awareness has been demonstrated to be an effective way to put an end to passive behaviour and help tra…

Disabled People from Welfare to Jobs: A Decision Support Tool

Despite repeated statements from successive governments in Norway, disabled people employment rate remains unchanged since 2000. A range of studies to describe and analyse the situation qualitatively and quantitatively have been performed, however we have not been able to find any study containing a decision support tool focusing on this issue. This paper presents a simulation model, built using the System Dynamics methodology. The model focuses on enabling disabled people to move from welfare to work, incorporating attitudes of disabled people and employers. The model is designed to cover selected factors that are believed to enable and encourage disabled people to take up jobs. It is inte…

Simulation models in eGovernment using system dynamics: A literature survey

System Dynamics (SD) is a method to build simulation models using computers, to study the behaviour of systems, and apply what-if scenarios aiming at achieving optimal policy design. To have an overview of the current state-of-the-art of SD use in the eGovernment field; we have surveyed related literature. Our main goal is to uncover the possibilities for future research by clarifying the shortages. The identified literature is not very large. In most of the literature, SD models use was limited to SD practitioners. We discovered low usage of Group Model Building and workshops despite their usefulness in involving non-SD practitioners in the model building process. Additionally, there is a …

Vulnerability Analysis of Interdependent Critical Infrastructures upon a Cyber-attack

Accessibility of Norwegian Municipalities Websites: An Interactive Learning Environment Experimental Investigation

Accessibility is an important aspect of websites generally and public websites particularly. Many ways could be proposed to enhance accessibility, however the impact of selected actions is hard to predict due to diversification and contradiction, in addition to the existence of the time factor. A System Dynamics simulation model including factors affecting the accessibility of Norwegian municipal websites was encapsulated in an Interactive Learning Environment (ILE). As the model promised to be able to change how users think and take decisions, this ILE was tested by users in an experiment. We have conducted a#x03B1;, a#x03B2;, and a#x03B3; change analysis on the results of this experiment.…