A CONFIGURABLE VISUAL PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT - A TOOL FOR DOMAIN-SPECIFIC PROGRAMMING

Visual programming is a powerful and appealing technique for building complex applications using domain-specific programming environments. The author argues that having a visual methodology and interface is important for the end users of such environments, who are experts in their domain-but not software engineers-and wish to create complex applications. Many domains, including plant control and systems engineering, are well-suited for visual specification. Thus, a configurable visual programming environment (VPE) has been developed. Unlike other systems, which are designed for a specific domain, this generic environment can be customized to many different domains. It is written in a domain-independent manner, and supports modeling principles that are present in many engineering fields. The author discusses the requirements and design of this generic VPE, and describes its use in a specific domain, process control. The VPE has been customized for this domain in the Intelligent Process-Control System (IPCS), a practical system used by process engineers in the field. The VPE is the programming interface in model-based systems that achieve automatic software synthesis through the use of domain-specific models. It can provide a programming environment for model repositories, application generators, and integration tools. In fact, different versions of this VPE are used at Boeing, DuPont, and NASA. And the Osaka Gas Information Systems Research Institute (Osaka, Japan) has commercialized the IPCS.