I-X Process Panels fact-file

What's the Problem?

A principal goal of planning, knowledge and workflow management is the coordination of resources to bring about more effective organisational behaviour. In the context of modern distributed, virtual organisations, when attempting any sort of collaborative synthesis task, it is likely to require the capabilities of both human and computer agents, the need for such management becomes most evident.

Towards a Solution

The I-X suite of tools is intended to provide a well-founded approach to allow humans and computer systems to cooperate in the creation or modification of some product, be it a document, work plan, design sketch or physical entity. The principal interface to these tools, the I-X Process Panel (I-P2) can be seen, at its simplest, as an intelligent 'to-do' list for its user. However, and especially when used in conjunction with other users' Panels, it can become a useful workflow management tool, reporting and messaging 'catch all', allowing the coordination of activity, and hence facilitating more successful and efficient collaborations. Figure 1 gives an overview of the design of the presentation of a I-X process panel. Figure 2 provides example screen shots of I-P2 and its supported panels.

A Panel can take ANY requirement to:

• Handle an issue;
• Perform an activity;
• Add a constraint;
• Maintain an Annotation.

These requirements can be handled via:

• Manual (user) activity;
• Internal capabilities;
• External capabilities (invoke or query/answer);
• Reroute or delegate to other panels or agents (pass);
• Plan and execute a composite of these capabilities (expand).

I-X reports and messages can be generated and sent, and the receiving Panel will interpret these communications, where possible, so as to:

• Understand current status of issues, activities and constraints;
• Understand current world state, especially status of process products;
• Help control the situation.

Since it is unrealistic to expect any one participant to have access to full knowledge of the state of the current process during a collaborative episode, I-X tools are expressly intended to operate in situations in which only partial knowledge from a particular perspective is available to a user.

Figure 1: Anatomy of an I-X Process Panel

<I-N-C-A> Model

An I-X Process Panel supports a user or a group of collaborative users in selecting and carrying out "processes" and creating or modifying "process products". Both processes and process products are abstractly considered to be made up of "Nodes" (activities in a process, or parts of a process product) which may have parts called sub-nodes making up a hierarchical description of the process or product. The nodes are related by a set of detailed "Constraints" of various kinds. A set of "Issues" is associated with the processes or process products to represent unsatisfied requirements, problems raised as a result of analysis or critiquing, etc. Processes and process products in I-X are represented in the <I-N-C-A> (Issues - Nodes - Constraints - Annotations) Model of Synthesised Artifacts.

I-X Tools

As well as the Process Panel itself, a number of additional tools are provided, accessed via a tools menu or through context dependent action menus. These include:

• I-DE - the I-X Domain Editor to create and maintain process models and knowledge in <I-N-C-A> format;
• I-Plan - performs hierarchical partial-order composition of plans from a library of plan schemas or Standard Operating Procedures. It also proposes alternative ways in which activities on the panel can be expanded;
• I-Messenger - to support structure task orientated messaging and reporting - as well as allowing for free chat where desirable;
• I-Space - to maintain relationships between users and panels, as well as descriptions of external services that can be used;
• HTML Viewer to provide help pages as well as to look at web pages without resorting to platform dependent full web browsers.

Figure 2: The I-X Tools include: 1. Process Panel (I-P2); 2. Domain Editor (I-DE): create and modify process models; 3 I-Space: maintain relationships with other agents; 4 Messenger: instant messaging tool, for both structured and less formal communications; 5 Issue Editor: create, modify, annotate issues.

Take a Video Guided Tour

See a demonstration of an I-X application here (requires Shockwave).

Try a Demonstration

The current release and documentation is available via http://i-x.info/release/current/

Technical requirements:

Windows NT/2000/XP or Unix/Linux/MacOS X, Java Runtime Environment 1.5.

Example Applications

Figure 3: CoAX - 3 Sample Panels

• CoAX - Coalition Agents eXperiment (DARPA CoABS, USA): http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/coax/
• CoAKTinG - Collaborative Advanced Knowledge Technologies in the Grid - EPSRC/e-Science, UK): http://www.aktors.org/coakting/
• CoSAR-TS - Coalition Search and Rescue - Task Support (DARPA DAML, USA): http://www.aiai.ed.ac.uk/project/cosar-ts/
• I-Rescue - to provide multi-initiatives and automated support for the creation and use of task-centric virtual organisations to help carry out live-saving missions. http://i-rescue.org
• AKT e-Response - an experiment based on a large-scale life-critical fire emergency and how AKT technologies may be used to alleviate this critical condition. http://e-response.org/

Further Reading

Key document:

Tate, A., Dalton, J. and Stader, J. (2002) "I-P2 - Intelligent Process Panels to Support Coalition Operations", Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Knowledge Systems for Coalition Operations (KSCO-2002), Toulouse, France, 23-24 April 2002. Available at: http://i-x.info/documents/2002/2002-ksco-ip2.pdf

All papers on I-X can be found at: http://i-x.info/documents/

Download I-X

The latest release of I-X is available at: http://i-x.info/release/current/

Semantic representation

View in the AKT Triplestore Browser or as RDF.

Also available in DOAP RDF (Description Of A Project )