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International audience; Assuring that operators will be able to perform their activities even thought the interactive system exhibits failures is one of the main issues to address when designing and implementing interactive systems in safety critical contexts. The zero-defect approaches (usually based on formal approaches such as [5]) try to guarantee that the interactive system will be defect free and thus will be fully functional during operations. While this has been proved a good mean for removing faults and bugs at development time, natural faults (such as bit-flips due to radiations) are beyond their reach. To address this kind of faults three main approaches are available: include fault tolerant mechanisms such as the ones offered by self-checking user interfaces [7], reconfigure the user interface and the interaction techniques so that part of the operations can still take place [4] or duplicate interactive systems and their user interfaces so that if one system fails, operation can still take place using a redundant one. This position paper investigates this last option connecting this redundancy approach to the concept of Distributed User Interfaces that provide a generic framework for understanding both their advantages and their limitations.

International audience; Evolution in the context of use requires evolutions in the user interfaces even when they are currently used by operators. User Centered Development promotes reactive answers to this kind of evolutions either by software evolutions through iterative development approaches or at runtime by providing additional information to the operators such as contextual help for instance. This paper proposes a model-based approach to support proactive management of context of use evolutions. By proactive management we mean mechanisms in place to plan and implement evolutions and adaptations of the entire user interface (including behaviour) in a generic way. The approach proposed handles both concentration and distribution of user interfaces requiring both fusion of information into a single UI or fission of information into several ones. This generic model-based approach is exemplified on a safety critical system from space domain. It presents how the new user interfaces can be generated at runtime to provide a new user interface gathering in a single place all the information required to perform the task. These user interfaces have to be generated at runtime as new procedures (i.e. sequences of operations to be executed in a semi-autonomous way) can be defined by operators at any time in order to react to adverse events and to keep the space system in operation. Such contextual, activity-related user interfaces complement the original user interfaces designed for operating the command and control system. The resulting user interface thus corresponds to a distribution of user interfaces in a focus+context way improving usability by increasing both efficiency and effectiveness.

Evolution in the context of use requires evolutions in the user interfaces even when they are currently used by operators. This paper proposes a model-based approach to support proactive management of context of use evolutions. By proactive management we mean mechanisms in place to plan and implement evolutions and adaptations of the entire user interface (including behaviour) in a generic way. This generic model-based approach is exemplified on a safety critical system from the space domain. It presents how the new user interfaces can be generated at runtime to provide a new user interface gathering in a single place all the information required to perform the task. These user interfaces have to be generated at runtime as new rocedures (i.e. sequences of operations to be executed in a semi-autonomous way) can be defined by operators at any time in order to react to adverse events and to keep the space system in operation. Such contextual, activity-related user interfaces complement the original user interfaces designed for operating the command and control system. The resulting user interface thus corresponds to a distribution of user interfaces in a focus + context way improving usability increasing efficiency and effectiveness.

This position paper presents a model based approach supporting development of advanced user interfaces for the design, simulation, tuning and the assessment of interaction techniques. It is based on a double concept: the introduction of additional information in models to allow designer to tune easily the interaction technique and the use of simulation and logging facilities to assess performance evaluation of the models. It proposes an alternative to user testing which is very difficult to setup and interpret when advanced interaction techniques are concerned.

International audience; The purpose of the ARINC specification 661 is to define interfaces to a cockpit display system (CDS) targeting new aircraft installations. ARINC 661 provides precise information for communication protocols between application and user interface components (called widgets) as well as precise information about the widgets themselves. However, no information is given on the behavior of these widgets and on the behavior of an application made up of a set of such widgets. This paper presents a formal description technique called interactive cooperative objects to define in a precise and non-ambiguous way such behaviors. This description technique also defines the relationships between the behavioral description and the user interface. We show the benefits of such a notation for the specification of interactive cockpit applications and we introduce each modeling concept on a small example.

International audience; This paper proposes a notation and an architecture for the management of failure on input devices for safety critical interactive systems. This management of failure is done by means of a reconfiguration of input devices configuration and interaction techniques. Such reconfiguration aims at allowing operators to still interact with the interactive system. In complement with this input device configuration problem the approach also addresses the issue of output device reconfiguration. Such problems arise in domains such as command and control systems where the operator is confronted with several display units. Due to space constraints the paper focuses on the reconfiguration of output devices. The contribution presented in the paper thus addresses usability issues (improving how operators can reach their goals while interacting with the system) by increasing the reliability of the system using diverse configuration both for input and output devices.