Enhancing the Transparency of Simulation Systems

In 2016, IABG developed a decision support system called STAGE (STrategies AGainst Epidemics), which can simulate different epidemic pathogens, strategies and their outcome. In the current version, the user can test a strategy against a specified infectious disease and see how effective the configured strategy is against the pathogen. One drawback of the prototype was identified during the evaluation, in which multiple users stated that they would need to know how the model works internally and which assumptions were made to generate the output to decide if they can rely on the computed results. Furthermore, the current version of the prototype doesn't offer the possibility to compare different strategies with each other and users cannot explore the output sufficiently. As software such as STAGE is intended to guide decision-making processes and therefore influences serious real-life decisions, which can have a huge impact, it is essential that the user comprehends the underlying model and the computed results. In this work, we therefore aim for the following research goals:

1. Enhance the transparency of the system through an interactive visualization in order to facilitate the model comprehension of non-programming-expert users.
   Enable domain experts with little or no programming background to better understand how results are generated and to evaluate the output of the simulation to get a better understanding of the underlying model.
1. Enable users to evaluate the results given by the system, to compare different strategies with each other.
   The system should give the users the possibility to explore the result of the simulation and compare different outcomes with each other to help them evaluate the quality of a strategy.
2. Give the users a better understanding of how the results of the simulation are generated by visualizing the underlying computational model.
   The users should be able to explore the simulation parameters and see how the output is created to raise trust in the reliability of the system.

Tasks

• Literature review on related work
• Identifying design goals in a pre-study
• Visualization mockups
• Implementation of final concept
• Evaluation of the system in a final user study
• Written thesis and presentation of your work

In collaboration with