Department of Software Technology
Vienna University of Technology


AsbruView: Capturing Complex, Time-oriented Plans -Beyond Flow-Charts Abstract: Flow-charts are one of the standard means of representing actions or algorithms in many domains. However, applying flow-charts in dynamically changing environments, like clinical treatment planning, reveals their limitations. Flow-charts do not include the temporal dimension in their design, do not allow complex paths through many components, and scale very badly. These are only some of the requirements for a means of communicating clinical therapy plans. As an alternative, a plan-representation language called Asbru was designed, that overcomes all the limitations of flow-charts. It is, however, impossible for a domain expert to work with Asbru directly. Therefore, a visualization is presented here, called AsbruView, which uses three-dimensional diagrams and metaphors --- running tracks and traffic signs --- to make the parts of Asbru easily understandable and usable. Even very complex clinical plans are easy to survey with AsbruView.


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Comments: rauber@ifs.tuwien.ac.at