ICTM - Soutenance publique de thèse - M. Sébastien COMBEFIS

There are more and more automated systems with which people are led to
interact everyday. Their increasing complexity makes it harder for operators to
drive them safely, in particular because badly designed systems may result in
automation surprises. Several accidents are due to such surprising situations, as
testified by real accidents. Examples include the Three Mile Island nuclear
meltdown, the lethal radiation doses administered by the Therac 25 medical
device, or the shot down of the aircraft of the KAL007 flight.

The contribution of this thesis is a formal analysis framework to assess whether a
system is prone to potential automation surprises in an interaction. Potential
automation surprises are captured by the full-control property. The minimal fullcontrol
conceptual model generation problem consists in finding a minimal
conceptual model that allows full-control of the system. The existence of such
conceptual model is characterised by the fc-deterministic property. The generated
models can be used to generate artifacts, such as user manuals. Three
algorithms are proposed: the first one uses three-valued deterministic finite
automata that characterise the full-control property in terms of traces; the second
one uses a variant of the Paige-Tarjan reduction algorithm, and the third one uses
the L* active learning algorithm. The proposed framework has been tested on
various examples, among which a large case study of an autopilot coming from
ADEPT, a toolset to support designers in the early design phases of automation
interfaces. Experiences show that the method proposed in this thesis can identify
existing automation surprises and also find new ones.

Sébastien Combéfis graduated from the Louvain School of Engineering (EPL) at
the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) with a Master of Computer Science
Engineering in June 2007. He is currently working as a part-time research
assistant for ICTEAM at UCL.

Membres du jury :
Prof. Charles Pecheur (UCL), Promoteur
Prof. Peter Van Roy (UCL), Président
Prof. Jean Vanderdonckt (UCL), Secrétaire
Prof. Thierry Massart (ULB)
Prof. Philippe Palanque (Université Paul Sabatier, France)
Dr Dimitra Giannakopoulou (NASA Ames Research Center, USA)