ECHOES: EduCational Hypermedia On-linE ... - Semantic Scholar

ECHOES: Educational Hypermedia On-linE System Antonello Pasquarelli, Filippo de Stefani Alenia Marconi Systems Laboratory of Information Technology Via Tiburtina km12,400, 00131, Rome, Italy. Email: {apasquarelli, fdestefani)@lti. alenia. it

Gregory M.P. O'Hare, Aidan J. Murphy PRISM Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin Belfield, Dublin, Ireland. Email: {Gregory.OHare, Aidan.Murphy)@ucd. ie

-

to help technicians to build a strong conceptual understanding of complex equipment in order that they may deduce appropriate diagnostic steps in cases of equipment failure; - to increase the structural and fhctional knowledge of trainees by delivering structural knowledge to them in a simulated Virtual Reality (VR) environment; - to enable novices to quickly develop a global functional view of complex equipment and to enable them to quickly relate to a systems expert. The ECHOES training environment can be used in two modalities: off-line during the instruction time, and online during normal work in the field. It is accessible over the Internethntranet and it supports course with or without the trainer assistance. The system follows a bandwidthoriented strategy since the communication links between the teacher and the learner sites could be of different channel capacities. Different environments (2D or 3D) will be presented to the user according to hisher channel capacity. The interface chosen for the system is that of the visit metaphor in order to leave the trainee or the technician free in exploring the virtual environment.

Abstract This paper presents the ECHOES' (Educational Hypermedia On-linE System) training environment, its architecture and the services ofSered to the users. The main objective of the ECHOES project is to build a distributed dynamic environment for educating and supporting technicians in using and repairing complex industrial artefacts. To pursue this objective, ConzputerWeb Based Training, Virtual Reality and Multi-Agent Systems are integrated and synthesised in the ECHOES environment. These technologies are used to aid users at different levels of complexity, starting from the novice, who wants to quickly develop a global functional view of complex systems, up to the technician, who needs a strong conceptual understanding of complex equipment. The user interaction with the system is agent based and the chosen inteface is that of the visit metaphor within a 2 0 or 3 0 environment, in order to leave the trainee or the technician free in exploring the environment.

1. Introduction

2. Agenthood in ECHOES environment

ECHOES is an ongoing European project, whose consortium is composed by Alenia (Italy), as co-ordinator, Sogitec (France), University College Dublin (UCD) (Ireland) and University of Siena (Italy) as partners. The consortium has also identified a User Interest Group and Icare, a French company, which trains Britair personnel, has joined it. An accurate task analysis, with the participation of the User Interest Group, has been carried out in order to define the user requirements. The User Interest Group will also be involved during the validation phase. The ECHOES system is a complex multi-user application, whose aim is to provide support for the following tasks:

An agent-oriented approach has been adopted for the delivery and realisation of the ECHOES virtual training experience. The term agent is used extensively throughout the literature and its meaning has become somewhat blurred. Some authors differentiate between weak and strong notion [4], the former encompassing the minimum characteristics necessary for agenthood, namely those of autonomy, social ability, reactivity and pro-activeness; the latter consider the need for the intelligent reasoners to have a mental state described in terms of mentalistic notions, typically belief, desire and intention. Some researchers advocate two additional requirements: those of rationality and benevolence. The adoption of these additional features facilitates the agent designs, allowing researchers to concentrate on those areas they are examining.

'

ECHOES (European Project Number MM1006) is partially funded by the Information Technologies, Telematics Application and Leonard0 da Vinci programmes in the framework of Educational Multimedia Task Force.

1114 0-7695-0253-9/99 $10.00 0 1999 IEEE

Within the ECHOES project a strong agenthood notion was adopted and a specific tool (Agent Factory) was commisioned for agent creation [l], [2], [3]. In essence, Agent Factory is a distributed environment for the rapid prototyping of intelligent agents. Agent Factory has been realised using Objectshare's implementation of Smalltalk80, the VisualWorks integrated development environment. It is a member of the class of systems that embraces the Belief Desire Intention (BDI) philosophy. The system offers an integrated toolkit that supports the developer in the instantiation of generic agent structures that are subsequently utilised by a pre-packaged agent interpreter that delivers the BDI machinery. Other system tools support interface customisation and agent community visualisation. Figure 1 depicts the agent interaction in ECHOES. Seven key agents deliver the ECHOES functionality. We now introduce these briefly:

t-

Figure I . Agent interaction.

- Interface Agent: its primary tasks are to analyse user

-

-

-

-

requests and forward them on to the appropriate service, to build up a User Profile and to manage andl to update the User Interface. Symptoms Management Agent: the role of this component is to aid the user in the determination of a given technical fault by analysing the symptom information entered by the field engineers. Procedure Management Agent: it manages and maintains the current set of fault resolving procedures that have been determined to date. It also interacts with the Symptoms Management Agent by evaluating the proposed diagnosis and returning a set of procedures to the user. Multimedia Management Agent: its role is to manage and to maintain the multimedia database. This database contains all the media objects utilised within the ECHOES system, including text, VR objects, graphics, video, sound and images. Courseware Production Agent: it allows a trainer to add its own courseware or to updatelremove courseware already available on the system. This component, in

close co-operation with the Interface Agent, provides a number of editing and management tools to enhance the course facilitator's productivity. The courseware production agent is a weak agent with such fimctions being provided by standard courseware production tools like Toolbook. - Courseware Delivery Agent: the role of this agent is to provide access to the ECHOES courseware. - CSCW (Computer Supported Co-operative Work) Management Agent: the role of this component is to perform the task of problem routing and CSCW support. This agent is also charged with maintaining the expertise database, which maps a set of technical faults on human experts.

3. ECHOES Architecture The ECHOES software architecture is depicted in Figure 2. The main software components are the user profile management, the 2Di3D synthetic environment, the diagnosis support, the CSCW and the databases. The AECMA 1000-D and 1388-2B standards for technical documentation have been taken into account designing the format of the Rules and Multi Media databases. All this components are managed by the agents and the user interaction is monitored and supported by them. This agent-based interaction allows the user to navigate in a customised training environment, which reacts according to the user profile and the user needs. Figure 3 reports the user interaction mechanism. The hardware architecture is composed of a powerful PC (i.e. Pentium I1 450 MHz) to be used as a server for the ECHOES environment and tools, together with PCs to be used as a client by the trainees or by the technicians. The client PCs are equipped with multimedia devices and professional graphical boards in order to best experience the services offered by the environment.

I

Figure 2. ECHOES software architecture.

1115

with filling some forms. The symptom and procedure management agents suggest the correct procedure or the expert to contact. - Manager Room: this room is reserved to manager users. It contains all the tools to view a schedule, to modify a course, to read a book, and to maintain the ECHOES environment. As far as the course is concerned, ECHOES has been designed as a system that can manage lessons produced by different commercial authoring systems.

h

+i

B

5. Conclusion and Future Work

\,“U \,d.

The ECHOES environment is an example of CSCW where working groups distributed in time and space can interact. It is composed of COTS components and is built using state-of-the-art tools for Internet applications. The prototype with full functionalities will be available by the end of the project foreseen by December 1999. An Early Prototype has been set up with the participation of all the partners in March 1999 in Rome. In the Early Prototype the complete ECHOES environment is accessible with a reduced, but significant set of services.

Figure 3. User interaction

4. Training and Assistance Environment The ECHOES virtual environment is built according to the visit metaphor. Depending on the channel capacity available to the user, the system presents a 2D or a 3D environment; it should be noted that the services are the same in the two environments, but they are presented in different manners. The 2D environment presents the services offered by the system using bidimensional maps and text. The 3D virtual environment is represented by a building where the user can move across the rooms exploring them. This space represents a familiar virtual environment created with the Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) [5] and viewable by the user with any standard web browser. The building is composed by the following rooms: Meeting Room: in this room each user has the awareness of the other users present in the room. Each one can exchange messages and interact with the others in the form of a virtual meeting. Library Room: in this room the user can select an object, view a n d o r download it. An object can be a book, an image, a sound, a video, etc. UCD has developed a Virtual Electronic Library Builder (VELB). Training Room: in this room the trainee can participate to a course. The room can be organised to offer the possibility for personalised courses or to show the same course to a class of trainees. Alenia has developed a radar course and Sogitec has developed a course on aircraft maintenance. Simulation Room: the simulation room is strictly related to the training room. In this room the trainee can interact with a virtual model of the system, or a part of it, described in the course (for example the cabinet of a radar system). First Aid Room: in this room the user (mainly a trouble-shooter) reports the problem he/she is dealing

6. References [l] G.M.P. O’Hare, N.R. Jennings, Foundations of Distributed ArtiJicial Intelligence, Sixth Generation Computer Series, Wiley Interscience Publishers, New York, 1996. [2] G.M.P. O’Hare, S. Abbas, “Commitment Manipulation within Agent Factory”, Proceedings of Decentralised Intelligent and Multi-Agent Systems, DIMAS ’95, Cracow, Poland, 22-24 Nov. 1995. [3] G.M.P. O’Hare, R. Collier, J. Conlon and S. Abbas, “Agent Factory: An Environment for Constructing and Visualising Agent Communities”, Pre-Proceedings of the Ninth Artificial Intelligence/Cognitive Science Conference, AICS’98, UCD, Ireland, Aug. 1998, pp. 249-261.

[4] M. Wooldridge, N.R. Jennings, Intelligent Agents: Theory and Practice, Knowledge engineering review, October 1994. [ 5 ] J.R. Vacca, VRML: Bringing Virtual Reality to the Internet, Academic Press, 1996.

[6] ECHOES Web site: http://www.lti.alenia.it/ECHOES/ ECHOESl.htm

1116