Commercialization of Software Model Architecture Visualization Tool

A critical problem in the defense and commercial communities is to understand network data in general, and network performance in particular. Over the past decade there has been a huge increase in the amount of networks and traffic, as well as ourdependence on their efficient operation. Concurrently with this huge growth in networks, there has also been a massive increase in computer graphics capability, driven largely by the economics of the computer game industry. This increase in graphicsprocessing power has opened up new opportunities for another generation of visualization tools in general, and visual network analysis tools in particular.This research project proposes advanced visualization techniques that leverage modern graphics processing power; moving beyond simple polygons, texture mapping, and 3D to create a new class of network visualization tools aimed at understanding performancein networks. Our ideas exploit immersion, VR, animation, smoothing, blending, adaptive interfaces, and new visual techniques to overcome inherent human perceptual limitations. Although relatively new to network analysis, the approaches have shown greatprogress in other domains. Taken together, our approach and the vastly more powerful graphics capabilities have great potential for dramatically improving our capability to model, analyze and understand network performance. The resulting visualization technologies will cause a paradigm shift in the way designers and users interact with and understand network models and traffic. The technology shall also apply to many different network analysis tasks, from telephonesystems, to dynamic network depictions of organizational and social phenomena. This visualization technology will also serve as a more general purpose tool for modeling and understanding many other types of complex systems that are currently designedusing techniques such as colored Petri nets.