Model-Driven HMI Development: Can Meta-CASE Tools do the Job?

Today metamodeling and domain-specific languages represent many promising beginnings to create non-generic tool support for project specific modeling tasks. Due to the inherent complexity and numerous variants of human-machine interfaces (HMIs) model-driven development becomes increasingly interesting for manufacturers and suppliers in the automobile industry. Particularly, the development of powerful user interfaces requires appropriate development processes as well as easy-to-use software tools. Since suitable tool kits are missing in the field of HMI development this paper describes the utilization of visual domain-specific languages for model-driven useware engineering in general and model-based specification of automotive HMIs in special. Moreover, results from a survey among developers are presented revealing the requirements for HMI specific tool support. Additionally, experiences with using current meta-CASE tools as well as standard office applications for creating a visual domain-specific language are presented. Based on these experiences requirements for future meta-CASE tools are derived