On the development of sustainable visualization solutions in industrial automation through Domain Specific Languages

Visualization systems to monitor or to operate technical processes in industrial automation depend on dedicated runtime environments and therefore on particular platforms. On the other hand, an increasing number of different platforms are available raising the development effort significantly. The Model Driven Software Development procedure fosters sustainability of visualization solutions by separating the functional content into models and the technical realization into transformation rules. Following that method, engineering of visualization solutions is a one-time process resulting in a model. Its deployment to different platforms is achieved by automatic transformations. This paper presents the core concepts of our Domain Specific Language MOVISA, that has been designed to capture only functional contents of visualization solutions. By focussing on unique requirements of the industrial automation domain, this paper will present in detail the challenges as well as the potential of model-driven approaches concerning the sustainability of visualization solutions in industrial automation.