Model-driven development of user interfaces for IoT systems via domain-specific components and patterns

Internet of Things technologies and applications are evolving and continuously gaining traction in all fields and environments, including homes, cities, services, industry and commercial enterprises. However, still many problems need to be addressed. For instance, the IoT vision is mainly focused on the technological and infrastructure aspect, and on the management and analysis of the huge amount of generated data, while so far the development of front-end and user interfaces for IoT has not played a relevant role in research. On the contrary, user interfaces can play a key role in the acceptance of IoT solutions by final adopters. In this paper we discuss the requirements and usage scenarios covering the front end aspects of IoT systems and we present a model-driven approach to the design of such interfaces by: defining specific components and design patterns using a visual modeling language for IoT applications; describing an implementation of the solution that comprises also automatic code generation from models; and by showing the solution at work. © 2017, The Author(s).