Patent Number: 059998946
Section: claims

1. A method for the analysis of process data of an industrial plant having automatically controlled plant parts, which comprises: determining which of the plant parts are represented for determining correlation by using a prescribable criterion;  prescribing a time window as the criterion;  prescribing features characterizing a plant process and providing parameters relevant to the plant process;  checking the presence of each feature for each plant part using the parameters;  determining correlations between combinations of plant parts or features using features common to various plant parts and plant parts common to various features; and  representing at least one of the plant parts and the features as information elements positioned in relation to one another, for representing a degree of correlation of two of the information elements in each case by a distance between the two information elements. 2. The method according to claim 1, which comprises combining a specific identification of plant parts and the parameters relating to respective operating states of the plant parts to form event messages. 3. The method according to claim 1, which comprises determining the positioning of the information elements representing the plant parts and of the information elements representing the features, for preventing the distance between an information element representing a feature and an information element representing a plant part from exceeding a prescribable first limiting value if that plant part exhibits that feature, and for preventing that distance from falling below a prescribable second limiting value if that plant part does not exhibit that feature. 4. The method according to claim 1, which comprises prescribing a time window as a feature. 5. The method according to claim 2, which comprises representing the information elements of successive event messages together as a state complex. 6. The method according to claim 1, which comprises forecasting a system state from a common representation of the information elements. 7. The method according to claim 5, which comprises comparing the state complex with a reference complex derived from plant-specific knowledge. 8. The method according to claim 1, which comprises determining three spatial coordinates to fix the position of each information element.