Visual Analytics for Early-Phase Complex Engineered System Design Support

This article reports on our ongoing experiences in developing visual analytics tools for real-world CESs. Our work focuses on the early design phase during which a large design space is explored, poor alternatives are pruned, and valuable alternatives are considered further. Visual analytics tools can provide interactive discovery, exploration, and understanding of real-world complex engineered systems (CES). The proposed tool, which focuses on the early design phase, can help users perform routine CES design analysis tasks and offer stakeholder-specific visual representations of complex design models.