Integrating Explicit Context Conditions into Model Transformations for User Interfaces

Model-based User Interface Development represents a promising concept for the automatic generation of user interfaces that allow interacting with technical systems like process plants. However, the development of the model transformations required for the realization of this concept proves to be a complex, error-prone, and thus costly task. Moreover, a single technical process often requires multiple manifestations of UIs (e.g. for different target platforms or environments). This is all the more problematic because existing approaches usually require the adaptation or even re-implementation of a model transformation in case of a changed target context. Based on an existing approach for the simplified development of model transformations by means of declarative mapping models, this paper illustrates an extension to solve this problem by promoting the use of explicit context conditions.