In engineering education, the accreditation and assessment of academic programmes is vital in order to maintain the quality and the status of engineering graduates, and hence the technical workforce. Results of a survey of the relevant literature and observations indicate that various accreditation models have been developed regionally, as well as internationally but most of these models seem to be non-uniform, too complex, non-transparent and, moreover, non-precise. This leads to confusion and growing concerns about the mutual recognition and global mobility of the engineering profession. As a result, there is an urgent need for a systematic global model of engineering accreditation that can be used to assess global professional skills and attributes of engineering graduates. The aim of the current paper is to present a brief review of existing accreditation systems implemented in engineering education worldwide as well as to describe the methodology for developing a global accreditation model in engineering education. Various existing accreditation models in engineering education are briefly discussed in this paper and the strengths and weaknesses of these models are outlined and presented. The need for the global accreditation model has been justified and the methodology for the development of the model is outlined with its advantages listed in the paper.

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This paper describes two methods that are introduced to improve the computational effort of stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) as applicable to the operation of multiple urban water supply reservoir systems. The stochastic nature of streamflow is incorporated explicitly by considering it in the form of a multivariate probability distribution. The computationally efficient Gaussian Legendre quadrature method is employed to compute the conditional probabilities of streamflow, which accounts for the serial correlation of streamflow into each storage and the cross correlation between the streamflow into various storages. A realistic assumption of cross correlation of streamflow is introduced to eliminate the need to consider the streamflow combinations which are unlikely to occur in the SDP formulation. A “corridor” approach is devised to eliminate the need to consider the infeasible and/or inferior storage volume combinations in the preceding stage in computing the objective function in the recursive relation. These methods are verified in terms of computational efficiency and accuracy by using a hypothetical example of three interconnected urban water supply reservoirs. Therefore, it can be concluded that these methods allow SDP to be more attractive for deriving optimal operating rules for multiple urban water supply reservoir systems.

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