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Simulating User Journeys with Active Objects

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Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends

Abstract

The servitization of business makes companies increasingly dependent on providing carefully designed user experiences for their service offerings. User journeys model services from the user’s perspective, but user journeys are today mainly constructed and analyzed manually. Recent work analyzing user journeys as games enable optimal service-provider strategies to be automatically derived, assuming a restricted user behavior. Complementing this work, we here develop an actor-based modeling framework for user journeys that is parametric in user behavior and service-provider strategies, using the active-object modeling language ABS. Strategies for the service provider, such as those derived for user journey games, can be automatically imported into the framework. Our work enables prescriptive simulation-based analyses, as strategies can be evaluated and compared in scenarios with rich user behavior.

This work is part of the Smart Journey Mining project (Research Council of Norway, grant no. 312198) and the SIRIUS Centre for Scalable Data Access (Research Council of Norway, grant no. 237889).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/smartjourneymining/abs_journeys_aol-23/releases/tag/AOL23.

  2. 2.

    See the webpage of GrepS for further details: https://www.greps.com/.

  3. 3.

    We observed that system logs contain a large amount of very short unsuccessful journeys with no events containing scores. Including all these journeys would negatively bias the comparison and therefore we remove them from the comparison.

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Correspondence to Einar Broch Johnsen .

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The third author has financial interests in the company (GrepS) that owns the skill testing tool evaluated in the case study in this work.

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Kobialka, P., Schlatte, R., Bergersen, G.R., Johnsen, E.B., Tapia Tarifa, S.L. (2024). Simulating User Journeys with Active Objects. In: de Boer, F., Damiani, F., Hähnle, R., Broch Johnsen, E., Kamburjan, E. (eds) Active Object Languages: Current Research Trends. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14360. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51060-1_8

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