Visual analytics of cyber physical data streams using spatio-temporal radial pixel visualization
Ming Hao, Manish Marwah, Sebastian Mittelstaedt, Halldór Janetzko, Daniel A. Keim, Umeshwar Dayal, Cullen E. Bash, Carlos Felix, Chandrakant D. Patel, Mei Hua Kerry Hsu, Yuan Yuan Chen, Michael Hund · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2013
Cyber physical systems (CPS), such as smart buildings and data centers, are richly instrumented systems composed of tightly coupled computational and physical elements that generate large amounts of data. To explore CPS data and obtain actionable insights, we present a new approach called Radial Pixel Visualization (RPV); which uses multiple concentric rings to show the data in a compact circular layout of pixel cells, each ring containing the values for a specific variable over time and each pixel cell representing an individual data value at a specific time. RPV provides an effective visual representation of locality and periodicity of the high volume, multivariate data streams. RPVs may have an additional analysis ring for highlighting the results of correlation analysis or peak point detection. Our real-world applications demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. The application examples show how RPV can help CPS administrators to identify periodic thermal hot spots, find root-causes of the cooling problems, understand building energy consumption, and optimize IT-services workloads.