Ahmed Abdeltawab Abdelgawad Aboughonim

Universitetet i Agder | UIA · Department of Information Systems (IS)

Aiming at examining the cascading effects of the failure of Critical Infrastructure (CI), this work-in-progress research introduces an improved System Dynamics model. We represent an improvement over the previous models aimed at studying CIs interdependencies and their cascading effects. Our model builds on earlier models and corrects their flaws....

Evaluation and testing are significant steps in developing any information system. More attention must be devoted to these steps if the system is to be used in high-risk contexts, such as the response to conflict disasters. Several testing methodologies are designed to guarantee that software fulfills technology requirements; others will assure usa...

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 th...

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. H...

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 dep...

Evaluation and testing are major steps in the development of any information system, particularly if it is to be used in high-risk contexts such as conflicts. While thus far there are various approaches for testing against technology requirements; usability or usefulness, there is a lack of a comprehensive evaluation framework that combines the thr...

Owing to the complexity of Critical Infrastructures and the richness of issues to analyze, numerous approaches are used to model the behavior of CIs. Organizations having homeland security as mission often conduct desktop-based simulations using judgmental assessment of CI interdependencies and cascading failures. Expert estimates concern direct ef...

There is an extensive literature on modelling cascading effects in Critical Infrastructures (CIs). Concerning the cascading impacts of a cyber-attack upon other CIs, a detailed scenario analysis done by the Norwegian Directorate of Civil Protection concludes that a considerable impact could be achieved. However, the analysis admits that the probabi...

Scenarios are designed to support decision-makers in gaining a better understanding of the consequences of their decisions. Scenario-based simulations, hence, present an ideal way to train decision-makers for complex and high-risk situations. Usually, training scenarios are human-authored which is limiting in terms of the number and diversity of th...

Natural and man-made disasters are becoming more frequent – unfortunately in most cases inevitably. By applying certain set of policies and guidelines, a city could resist, absorb, adapt to and recover from acute shocks and chronic stresses to keep critical services functioning, i.e. be resilient. In 2016, the Smart Mature Resilience, a Horizon-202...

A System Dynamics model focusing on enabling disabled people to move from welfare to work in Norway was encapsulated in an Interactive Learning Environment (ILE) to contribute in linking ordinary people with policymaking. The ILE and the model behind it are intended to enable people to get a better understanding of the policy options to inform bett...

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 a...

A System Dynamics (SD) simulation model including factors affecting the accessibility of Norwegian municipal websites was encapsulated in an Interactive Learning Environment (ILE). Accessibility is an important aspect of websites generally and public websites particularly. Many ways could be proposed to enhance accessibility, however the impact of...

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 possibilit...

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. Thi...

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 ref...

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 demo...

Access to all public websites is crucial to assuring equal opportunities for all citizens to participate in society. Several studies have been carried out to analyse the accessibility of websites. However, we have not been able to find any studies on the factors (other than technical) affecting website accessibility. The purpose of this paper is th...

The method presented in this paper allows for an investigation of how model behavior is created from the underlying model structure and how this behavior feeds back to change the relative significance of the model behavior. The method also allows us to identify the dynamics of the relative significance of the various parameters that governs the gai...