Bisimulation based design of user-interface for discrete event systems

Abstract

In human-machine systems, a user predicts machine’s behavior using partial or abstracted information on the system’s behavior through a user-interface. If the user-interface can not display sufficient information for user’s prediction, an automation surprise may occur. In this paper, we consider interaction between a user and a machine through a user-interface, where both the user and the machine are modeled by automata and the user-interface is represented by a binary relation. First, automation surprises are classified into three cases: a blocking state, a mode confusion, and a refusal state. Next, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the nonexistence of the automation surprises using simulation and bisimulation relations between the machine model and the user model. Finally, we show that a user-interface and a user model without automation surprises can be designed by utilizing the bisimulation algorithm.