A Technique to Specify the Graphical User Interface for Supervisory-Control Systems

Abstract This paper describes a new approach to determine specifications of the graphical user interface (GUI) for supervisory-control systems. Conventionally specifications of the GUI are determined by making a protype with prototyping tools to check GUI behavior. However, conventional prototyping tools have the following problems, (1) it takes time to define behavior of the prototype because designers need to recognize functions at each GUI object before describing behaviour of the object, (2) it is difficult to develop the GUI because the tools provide only limited information about behaviour such as MOTIF widgets, and sometimes require user to program, (3) the tools do not make any documents which are necessary for later maintenance. We have solved these problems with the following three techniques, (1) the picture-based prototyping technique allows designers to describe the GUI by drawing sequences of images based on the operator’s interface, (2) the multiple views technique generates views automatically to extract specifications such as functions of objects from the sequences of drawn images so that programmers can make programming code for the GUI based on the specifications, (3) the document generator technique outputs the specifications as documents in the specified format. These techniques allow designers to describe behaviors of the GUI rapidly and flexibly without any programming and to obtain the necessary specifications and documents.