Modern vehicles contain a wide range of functionalities that are provided by a large number of electronic control units and computers. These communicate with each other via a number of different bus systems (LIN, CAN, MOST, FlexRay). With the growing number of control units and comfort electronics systems that communicate with each other via these bus systems, the amount of data on the bus systems is also increasing significantly. The development and testing of new functionalities in the vehicle is therefore becoming an increasing challenge.

The aim of the "Visual Analysis on Surface Computers" project group is to develop new tools and methods for interactive visual data analysis that enable development engineers to visualise and analyse the processes of in-car communication in order to discover optimisation opportunities.

Concepts and technologies for explorative data analysis and data mining are used to discover structures and patterns in large data sets. Visualisation techniques such as diagrams, scatterplots, parallel coordinates, graph visualisations and others are used in combination to enable different perspectives on the data. To visualise complex relationships, there is a need to develop new, innovative forms of visualisation that scale with increasing data volumes.

Based on the results of the "Visual Analytics" project group, new techniques for the visual analysis of vehicle data recorded by data loggers on test drives during the testing of new vehicles are to be developed in collaboration with BMW Group development engineers.

The requirements for the analysis techniques are to be determined at the beginning of the project group in an on-site workshop with the development engineers of the BMW Group in Munich. The techniques are then to be integrated into the TaP analysis system on the basis of existing platforms for multidimensional data storage and analysis.

TaP is a system for analysing multidimensional data, which is gesture-controlled and operated on a large-format multitouch surface computer, thus enabling several analysts to examine facts simultaneously: www.youtube.com/watch