Interactive System Architecture Research Articles

A Comprehensive Review of Interactive System Architecture

This paper presents a detailed review of interactive software architecture (ISA). ISA has emerged as an important aspect in software engineering offering a framework that prioritizes user interaction, real-time responsiveness and adaptability. The paper explores various aspects crucial for the design, development, and maintenance of robust and scalable software systems. The review encompasses architectural patterns, design principles, scalability, maintainability, security, and emerging trends. The paper also examines the significance of ISA and challenges for the same. Objective: The objective of the paper is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the key considerations in interactive system architecture and how they impact the overall success of a software project. The paper also goes on to discuss the challenges and benefits of implementation of ISA Methodology: the study adopted a desktop approach by reviewing existing literature on the topic at hand so as to provide a simplified understanding of the interactive system architecture. Recommendations: at the end of the paper it provides recommendation on future developments in this field.

Towards pilot’s situation awareness enhancement: A framework of adaptive interaction system and its realization

Adaptive interaction system in flight control always aims to enhance the pilot’s situation awareness (SA) to achieve human-in-the-loop control. Most adaptive interaction systems are always activated according to the pilot’s current workload state. However, the pilot may already lose important information during a high workload, and thus the corresponding reaction of the adaptive interaction system would lag. Moreover, most adaptive interaction systems adopt the expert’s knowledge as a reference to generate information. Still, the tacit knowledge that reveals the information interrelationship is seldom studied, despite being the foundation of the interactive information display. To solve the above problems, we proposed an adaptive interaction system architecture with three subsystems. Firstly, we developed a workload level prediction subsystem, where physiological parameters are used to predict future workload levels, thus avoiding interaction system lag; Secondly, we developed a tacit expert knowledge mining subsystem to discover the interrelationship hidden in the expert’s perceived information, which will guide the interactive information interface. Thirdly, we developed a tips information inference subsystem to provide the lost SA information based on expert knowledge and the pilot’s online perceived information. The effectiveness of the proposed system is verified via a comparative experiment utilizing the control interface of a remotely piloted aircraft.

A high-fidelity prototype of a sterile information system for the perioperative area: OR-Pad

PurposeSupporting the surgeon during surgery is one of the main goals of intelligent ORs. The OR-Pad project aims to optimize the information flow within the perioperative area. A shared information space should enable appropriate preparation and provision of relevant information at any time before, during, and after surgery.MethodsBased on previous work on an interaction concept and system architecture for the sterile OR-Pad system, we designed a user interface for mobile and intraoperative (stationary) use, focusing on the most important functionalities like clear information provision to reduce information overload. The concepts were transferred into a high-fidelity prototype for demonstration purposes. The prototype was evaluated from different perspectives, including a usability study.ResultsThe prototype’s central element is a timeline displaying all available case information chronologically, like radiological images, labor findings, or notes. This information space can be adapted for individual purposes (e.g., highlighting a tumor, filtering for own material). With the mobile and intraoperative mode of the system, relevant information can be added, preselected, viewed, and extended during the perioperative process. Overall, the evaluation showed good results and confirmed the vision of the information system.ConclusionThe high-fidelity prototype of the information system OR-Pad focuses on supporting the surgeon via a timeline making all available case information accessible before, during, and after surgery. The information space can be personalized to enable targeted support. Further development is reasonable to optimize the approach and address missing or insufficient aspects, like the holding arm and sterility concept or new desired features.

Design and Implementation of Interactive Platform for Operation and Maintenance of Multimedia Information System Based on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data.

In order to cope with the challenges that operators face after the impact of diversified social channels in the field of interactive services, we actively build a new generation of intelligent interactive systems based on artificial intelligence technology, a semantic understanding, and intention recognition, covering rich media content, omnichannel coverage, high-frequency knowledge updates, consistent service response, high-quality, and low-cost intelligent interactive solutions is proposed. The solution provides overall business modeling for scenario design and a scenario-based knowledge expression system, with the function of fragmented knowledge processing. With complete text and voice information, combined with pictures, text, audio, video, and other multimedia, we intelligently interact with users, allowing users to obtain required information and solve problems in a pleasant and relaxing interaction. Therefore, the research and exploration of the intelligent interactive system architecture based on artificial intelligence is a useful practice and strong support for operators to redefine the connotation and elements of “smart service” in the process of building “smart operation.” Through repeated tests, it can be seen that the language similarity has reached 0.75549, which is very close to 1.0000. It can be seen that the design of this platform has been successful.

Interactive Systems: a Unique Place for Human‐Hardware‐Software Integration and their Vulnerability to Human‐Made and Natural Faults

AbstractInteractive systems are complex systems that allow operators to control and monitor other systems. The interactive systems offer one or several user interfaces, composed of hardware and software components, which are used by the operators to perform their tasks. The complexity of interactive systems lays in its nature (hardware and software integration) but also in the rapidly evolving technology (new input and output devices, new interaction techniques …). This paper argues that these interactive systems are the very place where human‐system integration takes place. It is thus important to design, develop, test, certify and deploy them very carefully. Unfortunately, methods, techniques and tools from software and system engineering need deep tuning to be adapted to their characteristics. The paper presents a generic, customizable interactive system architecture and highlights how its components relate to the human operator. It also presents a taxonomy of possible faults that may degrade the behavior of the various components. We demonstrate that these two contributions can be jointly used to systematically identify possible faults (both in the operator and in the system) and proposes mechanisms to prevent, remove or tolerate them.

Interaction concept and system architecture for the sterile information system OR-Pad in the perioperative area

Abstract Access to clinical information during interventions is an important aspect to support the surgeon and his team in the OR. The OR-Pad research project aims at displaying clinically relevant information close to the patient during surgery. With the OR-Pad system, the surgeon shall be able to access case-specific information, displayed on a sterilepackaged, portable display device. Therefore, information shall be prepared before surgery and also be available afterwards. The project follows an user-centered design process. Within the third iteration, the interaction concept was finalized, resulting in an application that can be used in two modes, mobile and intraoperative, to support the surgeon before/after and during surgery, respectively. By supporting the surgeon perioperatively, it is expected to improve the information situation in the OR and thereby the quality of surgical results. Based on this concept, the system architecture was designed in detail, using a client-server architecture. Components, communication interfaces, exchanged data, and intended standards for data exchange of the OR-Pad system including connecting systems were conceived. Expert interviews by using a clickable prototype were conducted to evaluate the concepts.

Promoting organizational change through new meanings: Designing the rhetoric and the aesthetics of service offerings

Design for services can be defined as the act of conceiving, planning, and building an interactive system or service architecture, the goal of which is to provide resources to support interactions between users and suppliers. This paper seeks to discuss the contribution of design to promote organizational change in public services through new meaning for services. Throughout the designing process, designers translate their interpretation of the meanings existing in a socio-cultural context and translate them into the language of designed elements that will give shape to the service offering. The authors propose that the aesthetics of services is a specific contribution that design can make to the service sector to help promote organizational change through new meanings. A case study was conducted to discuss this proposition. We present the design approach taken by a service design consultancy for the NHS Institute in order to change the organization of services provided to Multiple Sclerosis Patients in London Ealing PCT. Keywords: design for services, service aesthetics, healthcare services.

Design of Common Architecture for Interactive Systems.

Design of Common Architecture for Interactive Systems.

Design and implementation of a container-based virtual client architecture for interactive digital signage systems

Interactive digital signage is an important Internet of things application and has been becoming a common type of human–machine interface for multiple users. By integrating with wireless sensor networks, a digital signage system can provide smart features and on-demand contents to users. However, the performance of current interactive digital signage systems depends heavily on the server. An increasingly high number of digital signage clients and sensor devices attached to the system generating a huge amount of traffic flowed to the server may create bottleneck, management and scalability issues at the server, especially in large-scale digital signage systems. In addition, the current system requires application installation and configuration at the client side, thus leading to a high cost and complexity of deployment as well as management. This article proposes and implements a container-based distributed virtual client architecture for interactive digital signage to solve the above issues. In the proposed architecture, a number of digital signage clients and Internet of things devices are virtualized and managed by a container-based middleware. Each container-based middleware is responsible to manage and process data for a cluster of digital signage clients and corresponding Internet of things devices to (1) reduce load to server and improve the service performance and (2) enable lightweight clients to reduce cost and complexity in deployment as well as management. Implementation and obtained analysis results show the advantages of the proposed architecture.

The transformation-driven architecture for interactive systems

We propose new software architecture for interactive systems (systems with interacting components). This architecture, called the Transformation-Driven Architecture, TDA, uses certain ideas of the Model-Driven Architecture, MDA. However, unlike MDA, which uses models and model transformations at software development time, TDA uses them at runtime. To describe the dynamics of the system as well as interaction between the components, TDA uses special objects called events and commands.

Development of Online Computer Supported Collaborative Work with Augmented Reality for Machine Assembly Training

This paper proposes an interactive augmented reality (AR) architecture for online computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). Current CSCW applications for AR are focused on multiple users met together to collaborate on the same physical environment. The proposed architecture can provide collaboration through computer network without the need of face-to-face communication. System architecture and operation scenario are firstly constructed. AR applications for machine assembly trainingis studied. The proposed interactive AR system architecture can provide new experiences for users and both the effectiveness and efficiency for online training applications can be significantly improved.

A system for embodied social active listening to sound and music content

This article introduces a model and a system for embodied social active listening to sound and music content. The model is based on the simultaneous navigation/exploration of multiple maps, starting from a low-level physical map, up to a high-level emotional, affective map. The paper discusses the concepts underlying such a model, the system implementing it, and two concrete examples: The Orchestra Explorer designed for the Museo degli Strumenti Musicali at Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, Roma, Italy, and the interactive dance and music performance The Bow Is bent and Drawn (composer Nicola Ferrari), presented at Casa Paganini, Genova, Italy, in occasion of the opening concert of the 8th Intl. Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME08), June 4, 2008, and in museum interactive experiences at Festival della Scienza, Genova. This work is part of current research at Casa Paganini—InfoMus on embodied social active listening to sound and music content through the analysis and processing of expressiveness in human full-body movement and gesture. A user-centric interactive multimedia system architecture is proposed, operating on prerecorded music. From the perspective of valorization of cultural heritage, this research provides engaging paradigms of interaction with prerecorded music content, enabling a large number of nonexpert users to rediscover the musical heritage (e.g., classical and contemporary music) they may not be familiar with. Research was carried out in the framework of the EU-ICT Project SAME (Sound and Music for Everyone, Everyday, Everywhere, Every Way, www.sameproject.eu, 2008–2010) and has been recently extended to active experience of audiovisual content, and in particular to cultural heritage and museum scenarios: the novel interactive permanent museum exhibition Viaggiatori di Sguardo has been designed and developed at Palazzo Ducale, Genova, enabling visitors to explore virtually the UNESCO Heritage Palazzi dei Rolli in Genova.

ICOs

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. While the focus is on past work done on various large-scale applications, the article also highlights why and how ICOs and Petshop are able to address challenges raised by next-generation user interfaces.

Wearable performance

Wearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. ‘Wearable performance’ briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with ‘design in motion’ and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an ‘evolving’ garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the ‘connective tissues’ and ‘wearabilities’ of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment.

Reconciling usability and interactive system architecture using patterns

Traditional interactive system architectures such as MVC [Goldberg, A., 1984. Smaltalk-80: The Interactive Programming Environment, Addison-Wesley Publ.] and PAC [Coutaz, J., 1987. PAC, an implementation model for dialog design. In: Interact’87, Sttutgart, September 1987, pp. 431–436; Coutaz, J., 1990. Architecture models for interactive software: faillures and trends. In: Cockton, G. (Ed.), Engineering for Human–Computer Interaction, Elsevier Science Publ., pp. 137–153.] decompose the system into subsystems that are relatively independent, thereby allowing the design work to be partitioned between the user interfaces and underlying functionalities. Such architectures extend the independence assumption to usability, approaching the design of the user interface as a subsystem that can designed and tested independently from the underlying functionality. This Cartesian dichotomy can be fallacious, as functionalities buried in the application’s logic can sometimes affect the usability of the system. Our investigations model the relationships between internal software attributes and externally visible usability factors. We propose a pattern-based approach for dealing with these relationships. We conclude by discussing how these patterns can lead to a methodological framework for improving interactive system architectures, and how these patterns can support the integration of usability in the software design process.

A generic model for Immersive Documentation Environments

We propose a generic model for designing systems relying on augmented reality techniques in the context of an Immersive Documentation Environment (IDE). This model encompasses a user/system interaction paradigm, system architecture and exploitation scenario. We illustrate the use of this model on several virtually documented environment systems providing the user with enhanced interaction capabilities. These systems are dedicated to several applications where the operator needs natural (hands free) access to information, to carry out measurements and/or operate on devices (e.g. maintenance, instruction). These systems merge live images acquired by a video camera with synthetic data (multimedia documents including CAD models and text) and present the result properly registered in the real world. Vocal commands as well as multimodal interaction, associating speech and gesture, are used to improve interaction.

A dialog-based architecture for interactive information systems

Interactive systems may be defined as having the following behavior: a) the user's request is processed as soon as it is received and b) the result is presented to the user on the same medium, i.e. the screen, as soon as it is available. Interactive Information Systems (IIS), identify those systems often encountered in the business world, which consist of many input-output operations and little, simple processing. In the past few years, interest for IIS has been growing (see JAC 83, MAS83, DRA84): the man-machine interface has received special attention, due to the profile of the user who is not a computer specialist. Very few attempts however, have been made to design an architecture for this class of systems, although their characteristics have definite general design consequences. In this article, we will start by investigating the characteristics of IIS. A presentation of ISA (Interactive System Architecture) will follow, showing the main features of the proposed model. The discussion will then concentrate on the use of finite state machines and on the limitations of ISA.