Visual analytics of manufacturing simulation data

Discrete event simulation is an accepted technology for investigating the dynamic behavior of complex manufacturing systems. Visualizations created within simulation studies often focus on the animation of the dynamic processes of a single simulation run, supplemented with graphs of certain performance indicators obtained from replications of a simulation run or a few manually conducted simulation experiments. This paper suggests a much broader visually aided analysis of simulation input and output data and their relations than it is commonly applied today. Inspired from the idea of visual analytics, we suggest the application of data farming approaches for obtaining datasets of a much broader spectrum of combinations of input and output data. These datasets are then processed by data mining methods and visually analyzed by the simulation experts. This process can uncover causal relationships in the model behavior that were previously not known, leading to a better understanding of the systems behavior.