February 2009
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12 Reads
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2 Citations
The design and the operation of urban drainage systems and wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) have become increasingly complex. This complexity is due to increased requirements concerning process technology, technical, environmental, economical, and occupational safety aspects. The plant operator has access not only to some timeworn filers and measured parameters but also to numerous on-line and off-line parameters that characterize the current state of the plant in detail. Moreover, expert databases and specific support pages of plant manufactures are accessible through the World Wide Web. Thus, the operator is overwhelmed with predominantly unstructured data. The first part of our contribution describes the project SIMLAR, which covered information visualization approaches for various tasks and devices. Visualizations for mobile devices are especially useful in the case of large, distributed wastewater systems. Especially in the case of an alarm, mobile process information can help to determine if it is necessary to visit the plant. The second part details the project KOMPLETT, which researches intuitive visualization systems for complex plants. Considering the fact that the plant is unmanned and thus even non-experts have to cope with the system, it has to meet diverse requirements: it has to visually and intuitively indicate trends and irregular behavior of quantitative data.