Ensemble Visualization of Bottlenecks in Planar Flow Networks

Abstract

Abstract. The problem of finding bottlenecks in flow networks often appears in real world applications like production planning, factory layout, flow related physical approaches and even cyber security. This work introduces intuitive visual mechanisms to enable domain experts and users to visually analyze stable regions of a network and identify critical transitions. Those transitions form a varying bottleneck front for different configurations of network restraints. To tackle this problem, this work enhances the comparability of different network configurations by utilizing ensemble visualization techniques. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by showing how this enables users to evaluate the progress of different bottlenecks and individual regions in a flow network.