MoDyS-Project TLA

Trend Literacy Applied

Current implementations of trend displays in process control systems provide two forms of navigation: panning and zooming. Based on the findings of a field study on trend literacy we develop new forms of interaction that allow to enhance trend displays with query by example capabilities. This supports operator to get answers for actual questions like "I know this pattern. When did it occur last time?" or "This pattern is new to me. Did it occur some times before?"

Trend displays are important sources of information for many tasks in supervisory process control. They are efficient means to learn about process dynamics and time-delayed coupling of different measurements, they support trend supervision and prediction of the process's development in time.

For humans it is quite easy and straight forward to read absolute values, identify minima and maxima, get an idea of the frequency of repeating events and noise from the time ordered presentation of measurements or to compare and evaluate the similarity of two courses. This is not true for computer algorithms that work on signal characteristics only. The approach of this project is to combine human abilities and computer power to find meaningful patterns in time rows utilizing a query by example approach.

• Urbas, L. & Timpe, K.-P. (2004) Leitwartengestaltung für die Prozessführung. In R. Bruder & M. Schütte (Eds.) Ergonomie und Design. GFA Press.