User Progress Modelling in Counselling Systems: An Application to an Adaptive Virtual Coach

Counselling systems such as recommendation systems and virtual coaches assist users to gradually achieve their goals. For that purpose, it is usual to devise a progression plan consisting of intermediate, possibly interrelated, tasks or goals to be accomplished in order to guide counselees from their current state to a (desirable) target state, whilst taking into account their circumstances and needs. Users may also strive to progress in several dimensions or aspects at the same time. However, existing goal modelling proposals are mainly focused on processes and object flows, and do not reflect the variable manner in which user progression may actually take place. In this paper, we propose a user-goal oriented metamodel to represent progressions between user states that serves as a knowledge basis for the construction of adaptive counselling systems. The proposal is exemplified with the design of a virtual coach to promote active ageing in which personalization plays a key role.

[1]  Jan Mendling,et al.  A Study Into the Factors That Influence the Understandability of Business Process Models , 2011, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics - Part A: Systems and Humans.

[2]  Wil M.P. van der Aalst,et al.  YAWL: yet another workflow language , 2005, Inf. Syst..

[3]  Colette Rolland,et al.  Modeling Goals and Reasoning with Them , 2005 .

[4]  Dina Neiger,et al.  Goal-Oriented Business Process Modeling with EPCs and Value-Focused Thinking , 2004, Business Process Management.

[5]  Camille Salinesi,et al.  A Methodological Framework for Understanding IS Adaptation through Enterprise Change1 , 2002, OOIS.

[6]  Colette Rolland,et al.  Combining Intention-Oriented and State-Based Process Modeling , 2005, ER.

[7]  Fausto Giunchiglia,et al.  Tropos: An Agent-Oriented Software Development Methodology , 2004, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[8]  Geert Poels,et al.  Investigating Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering for Business Processes , 2013, J. Database Manag..

[9]  Colette Rolland,et al.  A Multi-Model View of Process Modelling , 1999, Requirements Engineering.

[10]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow patterns put into context , 2012, Software & Systems Modeling.

[11]  Sam Supakkul,et al.  Goal-Oriented Software Architecting , 2011, Relating Software Requirements and Architectures.

[12]  Wil M. P. van der Aalst,et al.  Workflow Patterns , 2004, Distributed and Parallel Databases.

[13]  Stephen Fickas,et al.  Goal-Directed Requirements Acquisition , 1993, Sci. Comput. Program..