ISS-Studio: a prototype for a user-friendly tool for designing interactive experiments in Problem Solving Environments

In Problem Solving Environments (PSE), Interactive Simulation Systems (ISS) are an important interactive mode for studying complex scientific problems. But efficient and user-friendly tools for designing interactive experiments lack in many PSEs. Mechanisms, such as data flow and control flow diagrams, adopted in many current PSEs to specify the component interconnection and interaction scenarios are derived mostly from a data processing perspective, and are not suitable for designing user-centred interactions. ISS-Conductor is an agent-oriented architecture for ISS components. It uses an extended finite state machine to model the run-time behaviour of a component, and adopts first order logic to represent the interaction constraints between components and to implement them in the knowledge bases of agents. ISS-Conductor separates the basic computational functions of a component from its runtime behaviour controls, and provides a high-level interface for users to design interaction scenarios. In this paper, we prototype a user-friendly tool for using components based on ISS-Conductor to design interactive experiments.