Evaluation of agent-based interactive systems : proposal of an electronic informer using Petri Nets

Chi Dung Tran , Houcine Ezzedine (1) , Christophe Kolski (1)

1 LAMIH - Laboratoire d'Automatique, de Mécanique et d'Informatique industrielles et Humaines - UMR 8201

The evaluation of interactive systems has been an active subject of research for many years. Many methods and tools have been proposed but most of them do not take architectural specificities of agent-based interactive systems into account. In addition, electronic informers are popular evaluation tools but current ones have often some limits. In order to solve these problems, we propose an electronic informer to evaluate agent-based interactive systems. This tool captures interaction events occurred in agent-based interactive systems and then, based on such captured data, it realizes treatments such as calculations, statistics and generates Petri Nets (PNs) to assist evaluators in evaluating three aspects of the system: user interface, non-functional properties (e.g. response time, reliability, etc.) and user’s properties (e.g. abilities, preferences, etc.). The approach has been validated by applying it to evaluate an agent-based interactive system used for the supervision of urban transport network.

Mots clés: Human-computer interaction; User interface (UI); Evaluation; Interactive systems; Electronic informer (EI); Software architecture; Interface agents

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Chi Dung Tran, Houcine Ezzedine, Christophe Kolski. Evaluation of agent-based interactive systems : proposal of an electronic informer using Petri Nets. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 2008, 14 (9), pp.3202-3216. ⟨hal-03268968⟩