The high-tech system industry faces many challenges, such as continuously increasing system complexity, scale and customer demands. We address these challenges using a domain model-centric approach. This approach focuses on clear and formal system specifications, connected to a chain of automatic transformations for system analysis, including virtual prototyping, and system synthesis, e.g. code generation. We have applied the approach to the development of large-scale office lighting systems in order to reduce development effort and handle the complexity of system control.