Designing visual decision support for sociotechnical enterprises

Abstract

As automation becomes more pervasive in industry, human decision-makers are becoming increasingly dependent on sensor-data to monitor and interpret performance across largescale enterprises. At the same time an exponential growth in data volumes, brought about by widespread automation, can make it difficult to transform low-level data into meaningful information. Information visualisation has been proposed as a means for helping humans to cope with data overload, but research in this area has predominantly focussed on data analytics tools rather than control interfaces. To support control, an interface should highlight important information but it must also present this information within the context of the systems functional goals. Graphic displays that achieve both of these objectives can provide visual decision support for human problem solving but their creation poses a serious design challenge.