Features of creating ACS in universities.
Since 1993-1996, information technologies have been actively introduced into all areas of educational institutions, and especially into the educational process. At present, any university has the following automated information systems (AIS):
AIS «Student Contingent Management» — end-to-end accounting of students in the relevant structural divisions of the university;
AIS «Educational Process Planning»;
AIS «Accounting for Current Academic Performance and Attendance»;
AIS «Scholarship Calculation»;
AIS «Schedule Creation»;
AIS «Electronic Document Management and Interaction Management»;
AIS «Science Management Activities»;
AIS «Management».
Corporate Portal;
OLAP systems – processing of information from a complex of legacy systems, including the preparation and dynamic publication of reports and documents.
The use of information technology to organize a system of access control and management to the territory and premises of the university is an equally important task. First of all, this is dictated by the requirements of criminal security in connection with the deterioration of the crime situation in the country and the threat of terrorist attacks. In addition, the heads of the educational institution require a ban on outsiders entering classrooms, and parents want to monitor the attendance of their children in real time. Also, the use of modern information technology has a significant impact on the prestige of the university.
Access control and management system (ACMS) is a set of access control and management tools that have technical, information, software and operational compatibility.
The implementation of this system will eliminate unauthorized access to the university premises, take into account the working hours of teachers, monitor student attendance, log the use of classrooms by teachers, and use a single identifier to enter various premises.
When selecting an ACS for a university, it is necessary to pay attention to the following important features and additional requirements for the software package:
the need to record student attendance;
the need to use the «anti-double-pass» function;
the need to combine several access profiles for one subject;
the need to integrate with existing automated information systems of the university.
Domestic developments of ACS are more preferable, despite the fact that they are inferior to foreign analogues in a number of parameters. This is explained by the impossibility of analyzing the mathematical and software support of imported systems.
An analysis of the Russian market for access control software has shown that the proposed solutions were mainly developed for industrial facilities and do not correspond to the specific features of higher education institutions.
At first glance, accounting for student attendance is similar to the task of accounting for employees' working hours. A deeper analysis showed the opposite: to account for an employee's working hours, it is enough to analyze the time of his arrival and departure from the enterprise's territory, but to record the fact of the presence of 50 students at a lecture, it is necessary for the teacher to organize a centralized registration of all those present at the beginning or end of each class. Since students have a habit of being late for classes or asking for leave early for various valid reasons, the registration time cannot be fixed, and its choice remains with the teacher. In order not to take a lot of time from the legal class, it is necessary to ensure a high registration speed using high-bandwidth readers.
In existing ACS, each employee of the organization is assigned a certain profile that determines their rights to access individual buildings and premises. This profile is directly linked to the position held by each employee and the affiliation of this position with the corresponding structural unit. In higher education institutions, a unique feature is that one ACS user can have several positions, namely, a student can be:
a university employee;
a student of another specialty.
An employee can be:
a student;
a postgraduate student;
a doctoral student.
Thus, when processing an access request, the system must determine what role the ACS user is playing at a particular moment in time and make the right decision to grant access or deny it.
The presence of automated information systems for managing the educational process and automated systems for personnel and accounting in universities makes it advisable to integrate the access control and management system with these systems.
With close interaction of these systems, the ACS will immediately respond to the following events:
hiring or dismissal of an employee;
personnel changes within the university;
admission or expulsion of a student;
class schedules, according to which teachers will be granted access to classrooms;
generating reports to track student attendance.
Thus, the ACS software available on the Russian market cannot be used to organize access control and management systems in universities without prior processing. According to preliminary analysis, upgrading existing systems for a specific university is characterized by high cost, since the developer perceives this work as personalization of the system for individual customer requirements.
There are two solutions to this problem. The first is that ACS software developers will respond to the voiced problem and offer a large sector of buyers a product focused on organizing access control and management in higher education institutions. The second path is most suitable for universities that independently provide themselves with educational process automation systems through the efforts of the relevant structural divisions and the inexhaustible potential of young specialists graduating into adulthood. This approach involves the development of an educational institution's own ACS software using open and inexpensive libraries from ACS equipment manufacturers — this is not the shortest path, but it is full of scientific novelty and interesting discoveries.