Field Guide for Designing Human Interaction with Intelligent Systems

The characteristics of this Field Guide approach address the problems of designing innovative software to support user tasks. The requirements for novel software are difficult to specify a priori, because there is not sufficient understanding of how the users' tasks should be supported, and there are not obvious pre-existing design solutions. When the design team is in unfamiliar territory, care must be taken to avoid rushing into detailed design, requirements specification, or implementation of the wrong product. The challenge is to get the right design and requirements in an efficient, cost-effective manner. This document's purpose is to describe the methods we are using to design human interactions with intelligent systems which support Space Shuttle flight controllers in the Mission Control Center at NASA/Johnson Space Center. Although these software systems usually have some intelligent features, the design challenges arise primarily from the innovation needed in the software design. While these methods are tailored to our specific context, they should be extensible, and helpful to designers of human interaction with other types of automated systems. We review the unique features of this context so that you can determine how to apply these methods to your project Throughout this Field Guide, goals of the design methods are discussed. This should help designers understand how a specific method might need to be adapted to the project at hand

Analogical specification reuse during requirements analysis

This thesis investigates analogy as a paradigm for retrieving, understanding and customising reusable specifications during requirements engineering. Cooperation between software engineers and support tools is necessary for effective analogical reuse. Retrieval uses a computational implementation of analogical reasoning to search and match many reusable specifications. On the other hand understanding, transferring and adapting specifications requires cooperation between the tool and software engineer. Cooperative support was designed for less-experienced software engineers with most to gain from successful specification reuse. Deliverables from this research have implications for software engineering, artificial intelligence, cognitive science and human-computer interaction. Specification retrieval is founded on a framework of software engineering analogies. This framework includes a set of domain abstractions describing key facts about software engineering domains. A computational model of analogical reasoning which matches domain descriptions to these abstractions was designed, implemented and evaluated during user studies with a prototype reuse advisor. An intelligent dialogue acts as a front-end to this retrieval mechanism by acquiring key domain facts prior to retrieving domain abstractions. This dialogue was designed from empirical studies of software engineering behaviour during requirements capture and modelling. Design of support tools for specification understanding and transfer was based on cognitive task and reasoning models of software engineering behaviour during analogical reuse and mental models of analogical understanding. Two empirical studies of inexperienced software engineers identified problematic mental laziness manifest as specification copying. A third study of expert software engineers who successfully reused specifications identified strategies for effective reuse. Detailed findings from all three studies informed the design of tool-based support for specification understanding and transfer. Findings also have implications for the design of tools to support other requirements engineering activities

Multiagent Systems Engineering: A Methodology for Analysis and Design of Multiagent Systems

This thesis defines a methodology for the creation of multiagent systems, the Multiagent Systems Engineering (MaSE) methodology. The methodology is a key issue in the development of any complex system and there is currently no standard or widely used methodology in the realm of multiagent systems. MaSE covers the entire software lifecycle, starting from an initial prose specification, and creating a set of formal design documents in a graphical style based on a formal syntax. The final product of MaSE is a diagram describing the deployment of a system of intelligent agents that communicate through structured conversations. MaSE was created with the mention of being supported by an automated design tool. The tool built to support MaSE, agent Tool, is a multiagent system development tool for designing and synthesizing complex multiagent systems

A group learning management method for intelligent tutoring systems

In this paper we propose a group management specification and execution method that seeks a compromise between simple course design and complex adaptive group interaction. This is achieved through an authoring method that proposes predefined scenarios to the author. These scenarios already include complex learning interaction protocols in which student and group models use and update are automatically included. The method adopts ontologies to represent domain and student models, and object Petri nets to specify the group interaction protocols. During execution, the method is supported by a multi-agent architecture

Ontological Representations of Software Patterns

This paper is based on and advocates the trend in software engineering of extending the use of software patterns as means of structuring solutions to software development problems (be they motivated by best practice or by company interests and policies). The paper argues that, on the one hand, this development requires tools for automatic organisation, retrieval and explanation of software patterns. On the other hand, that the existence of such tools itself will facilitate the further development and employment of patterns in the software development process. The paper analyses existing pattern representations and concludes that they are inadequate for the kind of automation intended here. Adopting a standpoint similar to that taken in the semantic web, the paper proposes that feasible solutions can be built on the basis of ontological representations.Comment: 7 page

Multi-agent systems for power engineering applications - part 2 : Technologies, standards and tools for building multi-agent systems

This is the second part of a 2-part paper that has arisen from the work of the IEEE Power Engineering Society's Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Working Group. Part 1 of the paper examined the potential value of MAS technology to the power industry, described fundamental concepts and approaches within the field of multi-agent systems that are appropriate to power engineering applications, and presented a comprehensive review of the power engineering applications for which MAS are being investigated. It also defined the technical issues which must be addressed in order to accelerate and facilitate the uptake of the technology within the power and energy sector. Part 2 of the paper explores the decisions inherent in engineering multi-agent systems for applications in the power and energy sector and offers guidance and recommendations on how MAS can be designed and implemented. Given the significant and growing interest in this field, it is imperative that the power engineering community considers the standards, tools, supporting technologies and design methodologies available to those wishing to implement a MAS solution for a power engineering problem. The paper describes the various options available and makes recommendations on best practice. It also describes the problem of interoperability between different multi-agent systems and proposes how this may be tackled

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

A State-of-the-art Integrated Transportation Simulation Platform

Nowadays, universities and companies have a huge need for simulation and modelling methodologies. In the particular case of traffic and transportation, making physical modifications to the real traffic networks could be highly expensive, dependent on political decisions and could be highly disruptive to the environment. However, while studying a specific domain or problem, analysing a problem through simulation may not be trivial and may need several simulation tools, hence raising interoperability issues. To overcome these problems, we propose an agent-directed transportation simulation platform, through the cloud, by means of services. We intend to use the IEEE standard HLA (High Level Architecture) for simulators interoperability and agents for controlling and coordination. Our motivations are to allow multiresolution analysis of complex domains, to allow experts to collaborate on the analysis of a common problem and to allow co-simulation and synergy of different application domains. This paper will start by presenting some preliminary background concepts to help better understand the scope of this work. After that, the results of a literature review is shown. Finally, the general architecture of a transportation simulation platform is proposed