Flexibility in MDE for scaling up from simple applications to real case studies: illustration on a Nuclear Power Plant

International audienceModel Driven Engineering provides powerful solutions for the development of User Interfaces. However, concepts and techniques are difficult to master and to apply: the threshold of use is said to be high, making designers and developers reluctant to use it. This paper investigates process model flexibility as a solution. We present three kinds of flexibility for improving design and development process models: (1) variability for equivalent choices, (2) granularability for several levels of details, (3) completeness for possibly optional and pre-defined reusable components. Flexibility decreases the threshold of use by reusability of knowledge, know-how and pieces of code. We illustrate these forms of flexibility on an industrial case study from the nuclear power plant domain. We explain how they are implemented in FlexiLab, a running prototype based on OSGi. The innovation is twofold: on one hand, the operationalization of flexibility; on the other hand, the jump from simple applications to real case studies thanks to flexibility

M2Flex: a process metamodel for flexibility at runtime

International audienceExisting design and development methods do not meet designers' and developers' needs. They are difficult to learn and to use; they are complex, sequential and rigid and thus far from being adapted, reliable and efficient. This paper presents M2Flex, a process metamodel for highly supporting flexibility. M2Flex is based on a recent definition of flexibility along four dimensions: (1) versatility, the ability of the metamodel to provide various equivalent choices, (2) granularability, the possibility of defining components with several levels of details, (3) completeness, the possibility of defining optional components and pre-defined reusable results and (4) distensibility, the capacity of the resulting process model to be extended or reduced at runtime. This paper shows how M2Flex is original by the flexibility it offers to designers and developers at runtime

Bridging the Gap between a Behavioural Formal Description Technique and User Interface description language: Enhancing ICO with a Graphical User Interface markup language

International audienceIn the last years, User Interface Description Languages (UIDLs) appeared as a suitable solution for developing interactive systems. In order to implement reliable and efficient applications, we propose to employ a formal description technique called ICO (Interactive Cooperative Object) that has been developed to cope with complex behaviours of interactive systems including event-based and multimodal interactions. So far, ICO is able to describe most of the parts of an interactive system, from functional core concerns to fine grain interaction techniques, but, even if it addresses parts of the rendering, it still not has means to describe the effective rendering of such interactive system. This paper presents a solution to overcome this gap using markup languages. A first technique is based on the Java technology called JavaFX and a second technique is based on the emergent UsiXML language for describing user interface components for multi-target platforms. The proposed approach offers a bridge between markup language based descriptions of the user interface components and a robust technique for describing behaviour using ICO modelling. Furthermore, this paper highlights how it is possible to take advantage from both behavioural and markup language description techniques to propose a new model-based approach for prototyping interactive systems. The proposed approach is fully illustrated by a case study using an interactive application embedded into interactive aircraft cockpits

"A model-driven approach for designing multi-platform user interface dialogues": dialogues specification

Human-computer interaction becomes sophisticated, multimodal and multi device and needs to be well-designed with the aim of facilitating application correction (i.e. to correcting errors/bugs in the application) or extension (i.e. adding new functionalities or modifying existing tasks). This thesis is focused on building a methodology of designing and specifying User Interface (UI) behaviour. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) is used to describe in detail the conceptual model and to define all its objects. The methodology flux diagram is provided with the specification of the consistency and the completeness properties of the transformation model. To support the methodology, we implement a graphic Dialog Editor in which Models are organized in three levels (abstract, concrete and final) according to Cameleon Reference Framework (CFR) and, whose process respects the Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach. Furthermore, the use of Dialog Editor is illustrated through a simple exam...Les interfaces Homme-Machine deviennent de plus en plus complexes. Leur conception nécessite des nouveaux outils et/ou méthodes. En exploitant l'aproche orienté-modèle, cette thèse repond à ce besoin en proposant une méthodologie de conception des dialogues multi-plateform

Model-Driven Development of Interactive Multimedia Applications

The development of highly interactive multimedia applications is still a challenging and complex task. In addition to the application logic, multimedia applications typically provide a sophisticated user interface with integrated media objects. As a consequence, the development process involves different experts for software design, user interface design, and media design. There is still a lack of concepts for a systematic development which integrates these aspects. This thesis provides a model-driven development approach addressing this problem. Therefore it introduces the Multimedia Modeling Language (MML), a visual modeling language supporting a design phase in multimedia application development. The language is oriented on well-established software engineering concepts, like UML 2, and integrates concepts from the areas of multimedia development and model-based user interface development. MML allows the generation of code skeletons from the models. Thereby, the core idea is to generate code skeletons which can be directly processed in multimedia authoring tools. In this way, the strengths of both are combined: Authoring tools are used to perform the creative development tasks while models are used to design the overall application structure and to enable a well-coordinated development process. This is demonstrated using the professional authoring tool Adobe Flash. MML is supported by modeling and code generation tools which have been used to validate the approach over several years in various student projects and teaching courses. Additional prototypes have been developed to demonstrate, e.g., the ability to generate code for different target platforms. Finally, it is discussed how models can contribute in general to a better integration of well-structured software development and creative visual design

User Interface Plasticity: Model Driven Engineering to the Limit!

Keynote paper.International audienceTen years ago, I introduced the notion of user interface plasticity to denote the capacity of user interfaces to adapt, or to be adapted, to the context of use while preserving usability. The Model Driven Engineering (MDE) approach, which was used for user interface generation since the early eighties in HCI, has recently been revived to address this complex problem. Although MDE has resulted in interesting and convincing results for conventional WIMP user interfaces, it has not fully demonstrated its theoretical promises yet. In this paper, we discuss how to push MDE to the limit in order to reconcile high-level modeling techniques with low-level programming in order to go beyond WIMP user interfaces

M2Flex: a process metamodel for flexibility at runtime

International audienceExisting design and development methods do not meet designers' and developers' needs. They are difficult to learn and to use; they are complex, sequential and rigid and thus far from being adapted, reliable and efficient. This paper presents M2Flex, a process metamodel for highly supporting flexibility. M2Flex is based on a recent definition of flexibility along four dimensions: (1) versatility, the ability of the metamodel to provide various equivalent choices, (2) granularability, the possibility of defining components with several levels of details, (3) completeness, the possibility of defining optional components and pre-defined reusable results and (4) distensibility, the capacity of the resulting process model to be extended or reduced at runtime. This paper shows how M2Flex is original by the flexibility it offers to designers and developers at runtime

Adaptive model-driven user interface development systems

Adaptive user interfaces (UIs) were introduced to address some of the usability problems that plague many software applications. Model-driven engineering formed the basis for most of the systems targeting the development of such UIs. An overview of these systems is presented and a set of criteria is established to evaluate the strengths and shortcomings of the state-of-the-art, which is categorized under architectures, techniques, and tools. A summary of the evaluation is presented in tables that visually illustrate the fulfillment of each criterion by each system. The evaluation identified several gaps in the existing art and highlighted the areas of promising improvement