Architecture modelling and evaluation of agent-based interactive systems

This paper presents an architecture for agent based interactive systems as well as an evaluation method adapted to such an architecture. In order to position the proposed architecture, the current state of the art concerning architectures used for traditional interactive systems is presented, along with that for agent-based interactive systems. The advantages and drawbacks of these architectures are discussed. There are two main types of architecture: those with functional components and those with structural components. In this article, the proposed agent-oriented architecture is considered as being mixed (it is both functional and structural). It creates a separation into three functional components, respectively known as: the interface with the application, the dialogue controller and the presentation. By using this architecture as a basis, we propose an evaluation tool called "electronic informer" which allow us to obtain and analyse the human-machine interactions in agent-based environments. This electronic informer is made up of several informer agents taken from the evaluation of the system architecture and more particularly from the multi-agent presentation system. It is based essentially on the acquisition of data coming from the evaluated global system.