Mod2Panel: A Design Framework for Model-Based Automated Generation of Interactive Panels

Abstract

A panel is an event-centric starting point for implementing a model-based interactive system. The design and construction of an interactive panel involve deciding what information to display, how to display it, and ways to implement the design intent to produce an interactive panel. Traditionally, the design of panels has been implicit in the deployed applications, rather than explicitly considered as digital artifacts. In addition, users must realize this implicit design manually by coding or configuring it on programming platforms, resulting in hampered and time-consuming control and analysis. Besides, current tools do not have a unified generation mechanism, which makes it difficult for cooperation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework Mod2Panel, which enables users to draw their interactive panel designs as models and can automatically generate interactive panels from these models. The models are described in a modeling language that involves structures, behaviors, layout, and parameters. Mod2Panel also provides a GUI-assisted editor for customization to fine-tune the generated panels and update their associated models. With the capabilities of Mod2Panel, users can unify prototyping, generation and deployment in this framework for purposes of operation and control. We evaluate its effectiveness and efficiency in applied case studies on complex control systems and system modeling, in which Mod2Panel successfully generates interactive panels to support control monitoring and system-level analysis. The operations in the generated panel systems demonstrate the effectiveness of Mod2Panel for real-world scenarios.