A CROSS-PLATFORM.NET CUSTOM CONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMAN MACHINE INTERFACE RUNTIME APPLICATION

The Human Machine Interface (HMI) is where interaction between humans and machines occurs. It is widely used in industry such as automatic control field. Controls such as button, text box and so on are fundamental and commonly used in the HMI. Controls typically contain the User Interface (UI) rendering and the business logic. The UI is the graphic display for users, and business logic is logic unit used to handle events of controls in UI. A typical HMI platform usually provides standard controls for users, but users may also want to use.NET custom controls such as self-defined controls and third-party controls. The feature of supporting.NET custom controls is what the thesis is concern on. Siemens is developing a new HMI platform in which the HMI runtime software has no prior knowledge of a.NET custom control until it is loaded during runtime. However, the business logic of the.NET custom controls will ideally reside in the HMI runtime software, where the full runtime functionalities are available. The key of this concept is to separate the UI rendering of a control and the business logic of a control. Hostin