A CROSS-PLATFORM .NET CUSTOMCONTROL ARCHITECTURE FOR HUMANMACHINE INTERFACE RUNTIME APPLICATION

Abstract: 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 thirdparty controls. The feature of supporting .NET custom controls is what the thesis isconcern 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. Hosting business logic in the runtime will allow sharing the stable and UI-independent business logic across multiple platforms. In this thesis, a research of existing solutions for the cross-platform custom control concept is carried out, and the concept of .NET custom controls, possible architecture of the cross-process communication model for the thesis topic are defined. The solution of a cross-platform .NET custom control architecture for Siemens HMI runtime software is proposed and the prototype of the solution is implemented under both the Microsoft Windows 32-bit (Win32) and the Microsoft Windows Embedded CE 6.0 (WinCE 6.0) operating system environment. The prototype fulfills the functionality well under both the Win32 and the WinCE 6.0 environment. Furthermore, the prototype efficiency is measured by testing time overhead for method calling crossing process boundaries in the prototype. At last, a conclusion is made and future work is discussed.