EDONA and Human - Machine Interface Design for the Automotive Industry

In car cockpits, a wide range of graphic displays, from the low-end multi-functional devices to the most advanced reconfigurable clusters, represent an increasing part of the on-board information systems. We address within the EDONA HMI project the modeling of such human-machine interfaces (HMIs) and the development of an integrated HMI design environment that would improve current development practices. In this article we specifically discuss modeling issues: we explain why the SVG format was selected as the basis of the HMI graphic content description and present domain-specific extensions, mostly related to the HMI functional description, that provide support for a consistent modeling of HMI components.