Visualization and Interaction for Knowledge Discovery in Simulation Data

Discrete-event simulation is an established and popular technology for investigating the dynamic behavior of complex manufacturing and logistics systems. Besides traditional simulation studies that focus on single model aspects, data farming describes an approach for using the simulation model as a data generator for broad scale experimentation with a broader coverage of the system behavior. On top of that we developed a process called knowledge discovery in simulation data that enhances the data farming concept by using data mining methods for the data analysis. In order to uncover patterns and causal relationships in the model, a visually guided analysis then enables an exploratory data analysis. While our previous work mainly focused on the application of suitable data mining methods, we address suitable visualization and interaction methods in this paper. We present those in a conceptual framework followed by an exemplary demonstration in an academic case study