Architecture of CIRCSIM-Tutor (v.3): a smart cardiovascular physiology tutor

This paper describes the architecture of the recent version (v.3) of a cardiovascular physiology tutor, called CIRCSIM-Tutor. The intended purpose of CIRCSIM-Tutor is to help first year medical students in developing a problem solving skill in the domain of cardiovascular physiology. This architecture was constructed using a systematic intelligent tutoring system (ITS) development methodology which combines the features of a systematic knowledge based system development methodology with an instructional system development methodology in a single framework. The architecture of CIRCSIM-Tutor (v.3) is flexible and is consistent with some important software engineering concepts. The architecture divides the functionality of CIRCSIM-Tutor into a set of subsystems which communicates with a message passing protocol. The shared resources such as domain knowledge base, lexicon, student model are kept separate as information stores which may be freely accessed by all subsystems of CIRCSIM-Tutor