Aggregated parallel coordinates: integrating hierarchical dimensions into parallel coordinates visualisations

Aggregated Parallel Coordinates (APC) are an extension of standard parallel coordinates, which supports the visualisation and exploration of hierarchies within numerical dimensions. Such datasets can occur when data is available at several granularities and these can be grouped or aggregated in some way (mean, sum, max) to form higher levels of abstraction. While existing parallel coordinates techniques can be used to visualise individual dimensions of such data, they have no provision for interactively expanding and collapsing such hierarchically aggregated dimensions. In race car engineering, specialised simulation software is used to derive a car setup for optimal performance during a race. Such simulations generate complex, high-dimensional datasets with a large number of records, many of which are inherently hierarchically grouped. The APC software was implemented in C♯ as a Microsoft WPF user control library. It has been integrated into AVL's data visualisation tool called SimBook and is being used to explore the output of race car simulations.