An image construction method for visualizing managerial data

High volume data with complicated relationships can render human decision-making a frustrating task. Computer-generated visualization is an approach that can assist decision-makers in gaining insight into the data so that eventually superior solutions can be developed. Current research in visualization has addressed how to deal with high volume data that have some inherent structures (such as hierarchy, network, or geographical relationships). Many management domains, however, have data that lack obvious structures to provide a base for computer-generated visualization. This paper reports a specially designed technique for visualizing such management data. Data objects involved in the decision-making tasks are assigned with geometry (called visual abstract) in Euclidean space. Then a set of image construction rules are applied to connect multiple visual abstracts into images that can be displayed on a computer screen. We use two business domains, manufacturing production planning and resource constrained project scheduling, to illustrate this visualization technique. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.