Process visualization is the visualization of data from technical processes and is therefore a sub-field of information visualization. Today the computer, which does the visualization, is connected with the process over a field bus system. TTTech developed a new field bus, the TTP (Time Triggered Protocol). Because the TTP is not yet supported by visualization tools on the market, a new visalization tool has to be developed.
Therefore we give an overview of the state of the art to have a look at available tools on the market.
We worked out the special design requirements for process visalization, which are mainly regard for human perception, redundancy, performance and intuitive interaction. Perception is the most important aspect, because the user often has to observe complex systems with a large amount of data.
Then we describe the application context, which is a monitoring node connected to a standard-PC running Windows NT, and how we implemented the virtual instruments including the displaying of old values, multi-instruments, redundancy and scales. Virtual instruments are bars, gauges, traces, LEDs and icons.
At the end we evaluated the system and found out, that our solution is a very useful and innovative implementation.