POST-INDUSTRIAL QUALITY FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

The paper has five (embedded) objectives: a) Reshaping the role of quality management for sustainable development. b) Specifying this role in the context of Romanian engineering education (focusing on affordability). c) Substantiating a new approach to quality for post-industrial engineering (adapted to a service-based society). d) Illustrating the approach for bodiless agents as service providers. e) Choosing as application field for quality assessment a challenging service: permanent education (in future, hence dynamic and uncertain environments). Starting from the EUROPE 2020 guidelines for sustainable development, the paper proposes a framework for integrating synergically two innovative research domains promoted by LBUS: quality management and modern artificial intelligence (agent-orientation). Thus, the concept of PIQUE is developed based on a series of papers published in 2009-2010 and on a cluster of PhD theses in Computers and IT in preparation. The main conclusions: to meet sustainable development requirements quality management must be based on qualitative validation carried out by the end user; PIQUE offers a credible framework for ensuring and assessing the quality of both hard to define services (as e-teaching) and their providers (bodiless agents).