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Reasoning about Interactive Systems with Stochastic Models

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Interactive Systems: Design, Specification, and Verification (DSV-IS 2001)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2220))

Abstract

Several techniques for specification exist to capture certain aspects of user behaviour, with the goal of reasoning about the usability of the system and other human-factors related issues. One such approach is to encode a set of assumptions about user behaviour in a user model. A difficulty with this approach is that human behaviour is inherently nondeterministic; humans make errors, perform unexpected actions, and, taken individually, both the occurrence of errors and response times can be unpredictable. Such factors, however can be expected to follow probability distributions, and so an interesting possibility is to apply stochasticor probabilistictec hniques that allow the modelling of uncertainty in user models. Recently, a number of process algebra based approaches to specifying stochastic systems have been proposed and in this paper we examine the possibility of applying these stochastic modelling techniques to reasoning about performance aspects of interactive systems.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, UK

    G. Doherty

  2. Istituto CNUCE, Pisa, Italy

    M. Massink & G. Faconti

Authors
  1. G. Doherty
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  2. M. Massink
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  3. G. Faconti
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland, UK

    Chris Johnson

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Doherty, G., Massink, M., Faconti, G. (2001). Reasoning about Interactive Systems with Stochastic Models. In: Johnson, C. (eds) Interactive Systems: Design, Specification, and Verification. DSV-IS 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2220. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45522-1_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45522-1_9

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-42807-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45522-6

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