Determining associations and alignments of process elements and measurements in a process

The present invention discloses techniques for automatically determining, without user input, one or more sources of a variation in the behavior of a target process element operating to control a process in a process plant, which include using a process element alignment map to determine process elements upstream of the target process element in the process; performing a data analysis on data corresponding to the upstream elements with respect to the target element to determine behavior time offsets, strengths of impact, and impact delays; and determining the source(s) based on the data analysis outputs. Techniques include automatically defining the process element alignment map by obtaining and processing data from a plurality of diagrams or data sources of the process and/or plant. The techniques are performed during plant run-time by any high-volume, high density device such as centralized or embedded big data appliances, controllers, field or I/O devices, and/or by an unsupervised application.