Patent Document ID: 20150261215
Application ID: 14212411
Patent Flag: 0

Claim One:
1. A method for determining sources of variations of behaviors of process elements used in a process plant to control a process, the method comprising: receiving, at the one or more computing devices, an indication of a target process element included in the plurality of process elements; defining, by one or more computing devices and based on a plurality of diagrams of the process or of the process plant, at least a portion of a process element alignment map corresponding to a plurality of process elements used in the process plant to control the process; determining, by the one or more computing devices and based on the at least the portion of the process element alignment map, an upstream set of process elements corresponding to the target process element; providing, by the one or more computing devices, indications of the upstream set of process elements to a data analysis to determine a respective strength of an impact of each upstream process element on a behavior of the target process element, wherein a set of inputs to the data analysis includes the indications of the upstream set of process elements and excludes any user-generated input; determining, by the one or more computing devices and based on the respective strengths of impacts of the upstream set of process elements, at least a subset of the upstream set of process elements to be one or more sources of a variation in the behavior of the target process element; and causing, by the one or more computing devices, an indication of the one or more sources of the variation in the behavior of the target process element to be provided to a recipient application, the recipient application being a user interface application or another application.