ASTUTE is a multidisciplinary and technology-oriented project with strong industry support. It aims at the development of an advanced and innovative pro-active HMI interface and reasoning engine system for improving the way the human being deals with complex and huge information quantities, during real operations that without any  type of assistance would saturate his performance and decision-making capabilities in different operative conditions and contexts.

 

ASTUTE fully addresses the objectives of the ARTEMIS work programme and specifically of ASP8 in terms of expected impact. The project gathers a set of high quality partners from various industrial sectors (Automotive, Avionics, Emergency Services) of key importance to Europe, having shared requirements to improve user efficiency and safety of their systems, all operating in data intensive environments. 

 

ASTUTE intends to provide an answer to this over-arching market demand by delivering a systematic approach and reference architecture for building pro-active interfaces for embedded systems which support the user decision making process.

 

Bringing together a large and complementary, in terms of competencies, set of industrial partners, allows for commonalities to be identified and opens the possibility for cross-domain sharing of concepts, methods and tools in order to enable reusable embedded technology development. In addition, the ASTUTE consortium includes experts in embedded HMI design, user/process modelling and pro-active decision support systems from several leading European R&D groups and SMEs, which ensures that the critical mass of inter-disciplinary competencies is reached and thus allows for addressing technological breakthroughs and novel reference designs. This altogether results in one of the largest and most ambitious European attempts to bring the human centred design philosophy at the forefront of the design methodologies for embedded systems with a clear downstream and use case industry driven approach, thus clearly contributing to the reinforcement of the European

industry’s potential to create important and innovative market opportunities and establish leadership.

 

ASTUTE will enable users of embedded systems to perform fewer errors and improve their working efficiency, in particular when taking decisions in complex and critical situations. This not only has a huge impact on the users, but also on the public when considering safety critical systems (e.g. industrial plants, airplanes, road transportation), thus also addressing key societal needs (e.g. less accidents, but also less pollution). In all addressed domains, by focusing on the user state and context

ASTUTE intends to extend the level of task automation or even introduce task automation in applications today only relying on human control.

The project will thus provide a clear answer to how the pro-active decision support can be bound together with interactive human-machine interfaces by combining powerful computational algorithms and complex human reasoning mechanisms and when possible, also providing the framework for closed loop adaptability. In addition, multimodal interfaces and dedicated sensors will be introduced in order to enable user profiling and context awareness to be employed for further system usability improvement.

 

Increased working efficiency, reduced error rate, improved decision making, even for highly complex and high-workload domains, will provide measurable means to assess the project impact and demonstrate to the relevant stakeholders the benefit of the ASTUTE approach. The latter will be evaluated and validated in real life scenarios through the use case demonstrators being developed in WP5.