Interdisciplinary and model-based development of user interfaces for production plants

Technological improvements have led to an increasing importance of user interfaces over the last years even regarding machines and plants. Customers expect an intuitive application with an attractive design as they are used to it in the area of consumer products (e.g. Smart Phones). In contrast, the current development processes in mechanical engineering do not focus properly on user interfaces. Therefore this paper presents a development method for user interfaces that enables an interdisciplinary collaboration between the plant and user interface engineers throughout all engineering phases. Common approaches for mechatronic development processes are combined with established development principles for user interfaces in order to achieve a purposeful development of user interfaces in the context of an industrial environment (especially production plants). In order to enable the proposed method, three interdisciplinary engineering models are adapted and extended for the present context. Finally, an outlook of further research activities, especially with respect to the evaluation of the outlined concept, is given.