QUICK FACTS
Ronald Bray, an engineer from Litwin Process Automation uses PV-WAVE
in his work in control and training simulator applications for the
Petrochemical industry. After years working for a large chemical
company, the engineer saw the effectiveness of PV-WAVE in the analysis
and processing of data from polyethylene plants. In his different
lines of work and analyzing a wide variety of data, Bray has found
PV-WAVE to be his tool of choice.
THE PROBLEM
Getting engineers to agree on the best software tools for process
data analysis and display is difficult enough at small firms with
centralized operations. At a large company, where process control
teams are dispersed widely among various plants and divisions, it
is nearly impossible. And yet, when six teams of engineers from
a large chemical company in Louisiana met to analyze process data
from several polyethylene plants, one tool emerged as the standard:
PV-WAVE from Visual Numerics.
"All of the other visual data analysis products that we tried
tended to choke on the tremendous volume of data," says Ronald
A. Bray, formerly a process control specialist at the company. "They
lacked functionality and didn't easily line up with our varying
data sources."
Bray's first use of PV-WAVE occurred in 1990 during a project that
required statistical analysis and display of process data for control
and optimization. He built several PV-WAVE routines to pull data
from a historical archive, where process control data, descriptions,
units and time stamps were stored. Time periods and tag lists were
entered as parameters.
Later,
as the six teams met for the massive process-control project, Bray
spent some time reworking his existing PV-WAVE routines to see if
they would prove useful. "During a short demonstration, the
other engineers were immediately impressed with PV-WAVE's ability
to organize and display results," Bray says. "A previous
project of this type required two weeks of effort just to collect
and organize the data. But with PV-WAVE, the entire data-analysis
portion was essentially complete within that amount of time.
THE SOLUTION
"Interest in PV-WAVE grew quickly as the engineers discovered
they could become productive with the application in less than an
hour," Bray says. "Other data-analysis tools were quickly
abandoned in favor of PV-WAVE," he adds.
PV-WAVE lets technical and business computing professionals interactively
explore, manipulate and analyze complex numeric data. Tightly integrated
graphics, statistics, image processing, signal processing and animation
let users rapidly interpret complex data sets, quickly identify
important features and trends and share their results.
The emphasis during the multi-team project was on analyzing process
control data to improve manufacturing productivity throughout the
company. Data on temperatures, pressures, flows and other process
control information were collected and analyzed. "One of the
teams collected nine hours of one-second data on 40 tags [about
one million samples] and was able to get the data from the disk
into PV-WAVE in just two or three minutes," Bray says. The
key to PV-WAVE's speed is an array-oriented, fourth-generation programming
language (4GL) designed specifically for visual data analysis. "The
code is compact and efficient," Bray says. "Also, since
it is an interpreted language, it is very easy to develop and debug
applications. It has the speed of a compiled language, where calculations
are done with large arrays."
Bray's custom VDA routines were developed with PV-WAVE Foundation,
Visual Numerics' flagship UNIX® product for data visualization.
"Other visualization tools that I had tried were painfully
slow and inadequate for these large data sets," Bray explains.
"They usually required data to be put in their own special
format before they could be accessed, which required tedious programming.
"PV-WAVE's 4GL, by contrast, reduces coding efforts by up
to 80 percent compared with traditional programming languages, such
as C and FORTRAN," Bray adds. "It takes time to get used
to the syntax and language constructs. But once you get used to
it, you can become very proficient at data analysis and visualization.
It is my preferred language because you can quickly create applications
that are easy for users to understand, yet have all the capabilities
required by power users." Bray's early work with PV-WAVE was
performed on Digital's VMS-based VAXstations. As interest in PV-WAVE
grew, Bray was able to port his PV-WAVE routines to a variety of
UNIX platforms, as well as Windows® NT and MS-Windows.
"PV-WAVE runs as an X application on the VAX, so any PC or
Macintosh® computer that does X emulation can be used to access
PV-WAVE applications," Bray says. "Porting a PV-WAVE application
among platforms takes minimal effort."
RETURN ON INVESTMENT
Today, PV-WAVE is still playing a critical role in Bray's work.
His team uses PV-WAVE to assist with their work creating dynamic
simulations to help regulate manufacturing processes for Litwin
clients. They work with large data sets, typically 50 to 400 tags,
with anywhere from 5,000 to 30,000 points per tag.
Even though Bray created the actual PV-WAVE routines, he credits
Visual Numerics for making it possible for one person to quickly
develop applications that improve the overall productivity of several
process control project teams.
"Without PV-WAVE, it would have been impossible for a single
engineer to develop and support such a powerful and useful application
as a sideline to the usual work that must be done," Bray concludes.
"We have been very impressed with the speed and robustness
of the Visual Numerics products, yet I feel we are just beginning
to explore their full potential. They integrate well with many types
of data and software tools and dramatically increase productivity
where visual data analysis is concerned."
WORLD CLASS PRODUCTS, SERVICES,
AND SUPPORT
Visual Numerics has provided technical software
solutions for numerical analysis and visualization for over 30 years.
The company's software products help users understand complex data
from a variety of sources and build business-critical applications.
Visual Numerics offers two product lines: the IMSL® Numerical
Libraries for powerful mathematical and statistical analysis and
the PV-WAVE® visual data analysis development environment. Visual
Numerics also offers customized consulting services for applications
that involve mathematical, statistical, or visual data analysis
to meet today’s business analytical needs.
