Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

publishedVersion

Publication Date

1-2020

Abstract

Production planning in the manufacturing industry is crucial for fully utilizing factory resources (e.g., machines, raw materials and workers) and reducing costs. With the advent of industry 4.0, plenty of data recording the status of factory resources have been collected and further involved in production planning, which brings an unprecedented opportunity to understand, evaluate and adjust complex production plans through a data-driven approach. However, developing a systematic analytics approach for production planning is challenging due to the large volume of production data, the complex dependency between products, and unexpected changes in the market and the plant. Previous studies only provide summarized results and fail to show details for comparative analysis of production plans. Besides, the rapid adjustment to the plan in the case of an unanticipated incident is also not supported. In this paper, we propose PlanningVis, a visual analytics system to support the exploration and comparison of production plans with three levels of details: a plan overview presenting the overall difference between plans, a product view visualizing various properties of individual products, and a production detail view displaying the product dependency and the daily production details in related factories. By integrating an automatic planning algorithm with interactive visual explorations, PlanningVis can facilitate the efficient optimization of daily production planning as well as support a quick response to unanticipated incidents in manufacturing. Two case studies with real-world data and carefully designed interviews with domain experts demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of PlanningVis.

Keywords

Production Planning, Time Series Data, Comparative Analysis, Visual Analytics, Smart Factory, Industry 4.0

Discipline

Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces | Software Engineering

Research Areas

Software and Cyber-Physical Systems

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics

Volume

26

Issue

1

First Page

579

Last Page

589

ISSN

1077-2626

Identifier

10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934275

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2019.2934275

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