Visual Exploration System in an Industrial Context

This paper describes ExploraTool, a new interactive tool to visually explore data from multiple repositories. The tool has been applied in a real setting to explore computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation data and obtain new insights into the space of simulations. The inclusion of free exploration, filtering operations, and chart generation provides a quick method for performance comparisons. The paper proposes an algorithmic means of processing input in the form of tabular data sets, generating a plausible hierarchical structure over metadata categories, which is used to initialize the visualization together with interactions' methods to explore, select, and compare sets of simulation data. This paper also reports on the evaluation study performed involving 24 engineers over two distinct locations from a large automotive manufacturer to evaluate the usability and the overall user satisfaction with the tool. Participants rated the tool as intuitive, useful, and effective.