The Laboratoire de l’IRIT en Interaction Homme-Système (LIIHS, IRIT Laboratory for Human-System Interaction) led by Philippe Palanque, has been conducting research in various aspects of Human-Computer Interaction for more than 10 years.

One of the focuses of the laboratory is on the Software Engineering techniques than can help producing interactive software systems that are both reliable and usable.

This group has been among the pioneers in the effective use of Petri nets for the design of Human-Computer dialogues. Petri nets are a mathematically-based formalism especially well suited to the description of reactive and concurrent systems, and the research at LIIHS has shown that modern user-interfaces can benefit both from the conciseness and preciseness of Petri-net based specifications, and from the potential from mathematical analysis brought by Petri nets theory. This research work has been consolidated by the definition of a specification formalism called Interactive Cooperative Objects (ICO), which is tool-supported (the PetShop development environment is now available) and encompasses all the aspects of the description of interactive systems. The ICO formalism has been successfully applied to various application domains, such as business software, groupware systems, direct manipulation highly interactive interfaces, and safety-critical interactive systems such as Air Traffic Control.

Another achievement of this research has been to show that Petri nets are also well suited to the detailed description of user tasks. Using Petri nets both to model both the behaviour of the software system and the behaviour of users that interact with this system makes it possible to reason on the compatibility and the adequacy of the software with respect to the user task. It also enables to make quantitative predictions of the performance of users interacting with the system. This theoretical work has received some experimental confirmations in the domain of Air Traffic Control, since empirical studies conducted by independent groups have led to the same findings that were highlighted by the formal analysis. LIIHS has also investigated the relationship between ICO-based specifications and other formal or semi-formal approaches, such as ConcurTaskTrees (developed by Dr. Paterno at ISTI), and UAN. The ICO formalism has also been extended to cope with distributed systems in order to manage multi-user groupware interactive software.

As the main aspect of the research developed at LIIHS is towards formalisms and notations we have also worked in order to make the notations developed usable by “end users”. This work has been done in cooperation with the CENA within a research project lead by Stéphane Chatty and Philippe Palanque. This work was aiming at providing Air Traffic Controllers with a tool supported visual language for testing interaction techniques in ATC applications. This work has produced a PhD and several papers in scientific conferences. The Network would be the opportunity to extend this previous work with a broader perspective.