ICOs

Abstract

The design of real-life complex systems calls for advanced software engineering models, methods, and tools in order to meet critical requirements such as reliability, dependability, safety, or resilience that will avoid putting the company, the mission, or even human life at stake. When such systems encompass a substantial interactive component, the same level of confidence is required towards the human-computer interface. Conventional empirical or semiformal techniques, although very fruitful, do not provide sufficient insight on the reliability of the human-system cooperation, and offer no easy way to, for example, quantitatively and qualitatively compare two design options with respect to that reliability. The aim of this article is to present a user interface description language (called ICOs) for the engineering and development of usable and reliable user interfaces. The CASE tool supporting the ICOs notation (called Petshop) is a Petri nets-based-tool for the design, specification, prototyping, and validation of interactive software. In that environment models (built with the formal description technique ICOs) of the interactive application can be interactively modified and executed. This is used to support prototyping phases (when the models and the interactive application evolve significantly to meet late user requirements, for instance) as well as the operation phase (after the system is deployed). The use of ICOs and PetShop is presented on several large-scale systems such as a multimodal ground segment application for satellite control, an air traffic control interactive application, and an application for new generation of interactive cockpits in large civil aircraft such as Airbus A380 or Boeing 787. The article emphasizes the demonstration of the expressive power of the notation and how it can support the description of various aspects of user interfaces, namely interaction techniques (both WIMP and post-WIMP), interactive components (such as widgets), and the behavioral part of interactive applications such as the dialog and the functional core. It also demonstrates that PetShop provides dedicated support for prototyping activities of behavioral aspects at the various levels of the architecture of interactive systems. 2009. ICOs: A model-based user interface description technique dedicated to interactive systems addressing usability, reliability and scalability.

Supporting the Analysis of Safety Critical User Interfaces

“…Mathematical operators such as >> (meaning sequence) are available for expressing temporal relationships among tasks as well as for the modeling of: specialized task types; explicit representations of data and knowledge; device descriptions; genotypes and phenotypes of errors and collaborative tasks. • PetShop is a tool for creating, editing, simulating and analyzing system models using the ICO (Interactive Cooperative Objects) notation [56,68]. The ICO notation allows developers to specify the behavior and the appearance of interactive systems.…”

Reliable Visual Analytics, a Prerequisite for Outcome Assessment of Engineering Systems

“…Bowen et al [13] use Z-based specifications to describe interaction processes, which offers formal verification capabilities and helps to identify erroneous implementations, as the authors demonstrate in the context of safety critical scenarios. Another example is the use of a Petri-net based modeling approach proposed by Navarre et al [44] addressing user interfaces and interaction in airplane cockpits. They strongly focus on verifying interaction processes for controlling an airplane.…”

Djnn/Smala

“…The above solutions create two levels of control structures: a standard framework to describe for the overall architecture of a program, and specialized constructions for describing some details. Other works take the same approach but reverse the roles; for instance, it has been proposed to structure programs using Petri nets and to use an object-oriented language for making computations when the transitions are fired [39]. Similarly, several authors have proposed to combine data flows and state machines by letting the state machines control which data flows are active at a given time [9,13,25].…”