Measuring the Complexity of Electrical Circuits: An Educational Study Based on Systems Engineering
Keywords:
circuits, complexity, indicators, education, measurementAbstract
In the realm of electronics systems, research on hardware complexity measurement lags behind that of software. To address this gap, we propose using the Index of Internal Effort (IIE) framework on a dataset comprising 39 questions from the textbook "Basic Electricity" from the Schaum’s Outline series. The book’s chapters follow a learning sequence, which this paper uses as a reference for the difficulty level of the questions that form the dataset for empirical testing. The variables in the electrical circuits were organized according to the complexity typology proposed for Systems Engineering and then applied to the IIE to calculate the complexity indicator for each circuit. Finally, Pearson's correlation test was used to analyze the relationship between the observed complexity. The results show a positive and significant correlation between the difficulty of the exercises in each chapter and the complexity measurement performed using the IIE. This study demonstrates the potential of the IIE as a viable alternative for large-scale, automated measurement of basic electrical circuit complexity, which can be used by teachers and evaluators as a low-subjectivity indicator of electronic project complexity.
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