Project Summary

The need for interaction between an automated control system and its users often exceeds the capabilities of current interfaces and justifies the study of advanced software environments to support the design and development of interfaces showing intelligent behaviour. The need to increase and improve user-system interaction is particularly strong in real-time decision support systems.

In order to obtain a satisfactory degree of involvement between the user and the decisions he/she takes an interface is required for which two aspects have to be carefully designed:

• the capability to provide information about the application domain and explanations about the conclusions advanced by the system together with the possibility to ask for alternative results and conclusions obtained from different initial hypotheses,
• the presentation of information in a way that is suitable for the type of user and the communication level he/she wants to establish with the system.

The main objective of FLUIDS is the design of a general environment for building intelligent interfaces of real time decision support systems, where a model of the operator-system conversation is supported by providing varied answers and explanations that are elaborated using artificial intelligence techniques and presented to the user by integrating advanced multimedia techniques. The FLUIDS project will provide two main results:

• a software environment for building intelligent interfaces for decision support systems that is charaterized by an open architecture of reusable building blocks that can be adapted to the requirements of different systems and users,
• a methodology for designing and developing interface models.

The project will be developed in two steps:

1. the first step will provide the user needs and the functional specifications validated through a demonstrator based on an off-line simulation of the actual system;
2. the second step will test the FLUIDS approach on two real time traffic management systems currently operating in the cities of Barcelona and Turin.