Automated plotting technology research for the point symbols in the multi-core environment

Electronic plotting is a technology that expresses the specific information with the specified symbols, texts and color. The map plotted by specified symbols is called “plotted map”. Now, the “plotted map” is mainly completed manually, and the process is time-consuming and tedious. It isn´t real-time and dynamic, and can´t meet the requirements of command automation. The automated plotting technology is an effective solution, and it is the main trend of plotting technology. Automated plotting can be implemented dynamically according to requirements and show the plotted map to us immediately. It is significant in the military, emergency or rescue field. However, because of its specificity and complexity, the progress is slow, and the related research is little. The related papers cannot be retrieved. Therefore, the research on the automated plotting technology is significant. In view of this, this paper focuses on the automated plotting technology for point symbols. The paper firstly generalizes some rules that the high-quality plotting should follow. Then, according to the characteristics of various kinds of symbols and the experience from plotting manually, this paper presents a simple and efficient algorithm that can help us to generate dynamically plotted maps. The algorithm can plot the map for point symbols at the similar results of plotting manually. It is proved to be practical and efficient in the multi-core environment with OpenMP. A plotting system based on the algorithm has been implemented and an initial evaluation shows that it is promising.