RESEARCH PROGRAM
Title: Interactive Specification and Visualization of Features
to Support Factory Planning
Name: Dr. Diana Fernandez-Prieto
(former student)
Project Discription:
Analysis of relevant physical properties and performance of factory - and linking this to the factory design
Starting situation
Designing production facilities is a complex process that involves the analysis of multiple factors, such as, the estimation of implementation and production costs, the flow of material through the different processes, and energy performance, among others. Although, virtual factory models are used to help planners to estimate the impact of these factors in a real environment, the understanding aspects as the physical properties of the machines and their performance in a factory poses a significant challenge to the factory planning process. It is crucial that important occurrences related to the indoor environment of a factory under critical conditions (e.g., machinery wear: impact of the damage of the cooling system of a particular machine) become apparent from the virtual model.
Approach
We will research and develop means to interactively specify and evaluate aggregate features in the virtual factory model in order to support the factory planning process in the Concept Planning and Detailed Planning phases. Here, we will explore alternatives to facilitate description and visual representation of relevant subsets of the data generated by virtual factory models. Interaction and visualization techniques such as, query-driven visualization, transfer functions design, and brushing and linking will be studied. Further, we propose to work in the definition of a domain specific language to describe the transformations and operations required by factory planners to effectively manipulate and explore this data.
Expected Results
The overall goal of this project is to research and provide appropriate techniques to allow planners to explore, aggregate, visualize, and analyze the various aspects considered during the factory planning process. We propose the development of a visual interactive tool that allows factory planners to manipulate and configure visualizations without prior knowledge of the visualization techniques in order to facilitate the process of getting insights about how to improve and adjust a factory design.
Please add a picture and a signature for it.
Figure: Visual exploration tool for the interactive analysis of time-dependent data.
Source: Fernandez-Prieto D., Hagen E., Engel D., Bayer D., Hernandez J. H., Garth C., and Scheler I. Visual Exploration of Location-Based Social Networks Data in Urban Planning. To appear in: IEEE PacificVis Visualization Notes Short Paper Track, 2
