Decision support framework ExtraPlanT with remote access and telephony interface

ExtraPlanT system is a multi-agent production planning system designed for small factories, which needs to react quickly on market changes. To deal with this requirement, ExtraPlanT system has been equipped with an extra-enterprise access feature that allows managers to access and use the system whenever and wherever they need. One possibility of the extra-enterprise access is the telephony interface using computer based speech recognition and synthesis. The interface has been built on a VoiceXML technology, and it uses DTMF and speech input and a synthesized speech output. VoiceXML documents are generated by JAVA servlets running on Tomcat server. To overcome the main disadvantages of telephony interfaces: sequential, transient and slow presentation of information, two techniques has been developed for the ExtraPlanT telephony interface. The first technique is the two-level communication model based on analytical module-knowledge-based system that transforms data into a short summary. On a user request, each summary can be followed by a detailed explanation. The second technique is a dynamical selection of prompts wording, which selects a wording of the prompts according to estimated user experience in order to find an optimal dialog length and descriptiveness.