Functional optimization of a Persian lime packing using TRIZ and multi-objective genetic algorithms

This article proposes a novel approach that uses a mathematical model optimized by Genetic Algorithms harmonized with the Russian theory of problem solving and invention (TRIZ) to design an export packing of Persian Lime. The mathematical model (with functional elements of non-spatial type) optimizes the spaces of the Persian Lime Packing, maximizes the Resistance to Vertical Compression and minimizes the Amount of Material Used, according to the operation restrictions of the packing during the transport of the merchandise. This approach is developed in four phases: the identification of the solution space; the optimization of the conceptual design; the application of TRIZ; and the generation of the final proposal solution. The results show the proposed packing (with 28% less cardboard) supports at least the same vertical load with respect to the nearest competitor packing. However, with the same number of packings per pallet and pallets per container, the space used by the packing assembled and deployed in the container is greater by 10% and 38% respectively. Besides, TRIZ includes innovative non-spatial elements such as the airflow and the friction of the product inside the packing. The contribution of this approach can be replicable for the packing design of other horticultural products of the agri-food chai

Integrated Model of Product Design Methods

A critical factor in product innovation creativity is the development of design methodologies in various fields. The design and manufacture of a product, whether new or existing, is a significant part of engineering activities. The ability to design, develop, and produce products that customers want efficiently is the key to success in today’s dynamic global market. Among these capabilities is the ability to design products that are competitive, cost-effective, and ready to be marketed on time. One key factor for maintaining competitiveness in the market is the focus on product and innovation processes by using various integrated design methods that are implemented as a standard part of design activities. The innovative integrated method, which combines various product design methods precisely can solve the main contradictory problems in the process from product demand analysis, product design, to production

Exploiting TRIZ Tools in Interaction Design

Abstract Current market laws ask for new product development methods and tools dealing with both technological and interaction related issues. Starting from this, the research described in this paper aims at finding and exploiting some TRIZ tools in interaction design field of practice. TRIZ theory offers well defined and structured methods and tools, and allows generation of generic guidelines for innovative design of a huge variety of products. Interaction design focuses on studying and developing a correct interaction between users and products, in order to maximize cognitive compatibility. Real goal of this research is developing a new design method where systematic approach to innovation of TRIZ compensates for some lacks of the user centered interaction design process. Starting from similarities and differences between tools currently used in these two domains, the research considers the TRIZ thirty-nine features, the forty inventive principles, and the contradiction matrix. These elements are adapted to the requirements of the interaction design field of practice, obeying to classic usability rules. These new elements contribute to the definition and development of a new design framework named interaction design guidelines - IDGL. The effectiveness of these elements has started to be tested in a case study focused on the interaction design of a new DVD recorder

Development of an advanced composite system form for constructability improvement through a Design for Six Sigma process

System form is widely used when constructing concrete buildings and structures because it has high productivity and good concrete casting quality compared with traditional hand-set form. However, from a worker’s perspective, system form is still very harsh to handle because of its heavy weight, noise generation, and use of releasing agent, and it also attenuates the productivity of system formwork. Therefore, this study proposes the use of an advanced composite material-based concrete form for workers using a Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) process to improve constructability of system formwork. User requirements are systematically reflected in the technical characteristics of concrete form, and innovative principles are scientifically organized through the DFSS process that mainly consists of quality function deployment and theory of creative problem-solving methods. The proposed composite form showed improved performance in deriving high-quality formwork and worker-friendly working conditions compared with previous system forms. Additionally, this study demonstrated how the DFSS will be a valuable tool for technology development and systematic decision-making in building construction

Design for human safety in manufacturing systems: applications of design theories, methodologies, tools and techniques

During recent decades, there has been growing awareness of human safety in the design process. The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on design for human safety (DfHS) in manufacturing systems. To this end, a process for systematically reviewing DfHS studies was used. The authors focused in particular on the applications of design theories and methodologies (DTM) and design tools and techniques (DTT) to analyse and identify work situations in order to improve human safety in manufacturing system design. The authors also tried to identify the design phases in which these DTM and DTT could be applied. This research review covered papers published between 1980 and 2015, and combined seven groups of terms: DfHS, design, safety, DTM, DTT, risk and working situation. A critical analysis was also performed in view to defining a research agenda and the most prominent key actions capable of pointing out paths for future research

Collaborative framework in computer aided innovation 2.0 : Application to process system engineering

In economy nowadays, the act of innovation is in general social; it requires the management of knowledge, and the techniques and methodologies to drive it. Innovation is not the product of one isolated intelligence, instead, it is the result of a multi-disciplinary workgroup lead by a process or a methodology. The conceptual design, which is found in the first stages of the innovation process, represents one of the most important challenges in industry nowadays. One of the main challenges faced by chemical industries related to the conceptual design phase is to provide the means in the form of methods and computational tools, for solving problems systematically, at the same time that benefiting from the collective efforts of individual intelligences involved. Hence, the main objective of this work is to provide a solution to improve the creative capacity of a team involved in the innovation process, in particular the preliminary (critical) phase of conceptual design. Consequently, it is important to understand the techniques, methods and tools that best support the generation of novel ideas and creative solutions. In addition, it is necessary to study the contribution of information and communication technologies as the mean to support collaboration. Web technologies are considered as complementary tools to implement methods and techniques in collaborative design, and particularly in the conceptual design stage. These technologies allow setting up distributed collaborative environments to bring together the resources and the experts who can relate the existing pieces of knowledge to new contexts. It is the synergy created in this kind of environment, which allow producing valuable concepts and ideas in the form of Collective Intelligence. Nevertheless in most existing solutions for collective intelligence or crowdsourcing environments, they do not report the use of a particular methodology to improve the participants' creativity. The solution in this work describes a social network service that enables users to cooperatively solve problems oriented (but not limited) to the phase of conceptual design. In this work we propose that the use of Collective Intelligence in combination with the model TRIZ-CBR could lead the creative efforts in a team to develop innovative solutions. With this work we are looking for connecting experts from one particular field, TRIZ practitioners and stakeholders with the objective to solve problems in collaboration unlashing the collective intelligence to improve creativity. This work uses the basis of the concept named "Open CAI 2.0" to propose a solution in the form of a theoretical framework. The contributions seek to move the development of the field in Computer Aided Innovation a step forward

Nature-inspired survivability: Prey-inspired survivability countermeasures for cloud computing security challenges

As cloud computing environments become complex, adversaries have become highly sophisticated and unpredictable. Moreover, they can easily increase attack power and persist longer before detection. Uncertain malicious actions, latent risks, Unobserved or Unobservable risks (UUURs) characterise this new threat domain. This thesis proposes prey-inspired survivability to address unpredictable security challenges borne out of UUURs. While survivability is a well-addressed phenomenon in non-extinct prey animals, applying prey survivability to cloud computing directly is challenging due to contradicting end goals. How to manage evolving survivability goals and requirements under contradicting environmental conditions adds to the challenges. To address these challenges, this thesis proposes a holistic taxonomy which integrate multiple and disparate perspectives of cloud security challenges. In addition, it proposes the TRIZ (Teorija Rezbenija Izobretatelskib Zadach) to derive prey-inspired solutions through resolving contradiction. First, it develops a 3-step process to facilitate interdomain transfer of concepts from nature to cloud. Moreover, TRIZ’s generic approach suggests specific solutions for cloud computing survivability. Then, the thesis presents the conceptual prey-inspired cloud computing survivability framework (Pi-CCSF), built upon TRIZ derived solutions. The framework run-time is pushed to the user-space to support evolving survivability design goals. Furthermore, a target-based decision-making technique (TBDM) is proposed to manage survivability decisions. To evaluate the prey-inspired survivability concept, Pi-CCSF simulator is developed and implemented. Evaluation results shows that escalating survivability actions improve the vitality of vulnerable and compromised virtual machines (VMs) by 5% and dramatically improve their overall survivability. Hypothesis testing conclusively supports the hypothesis that the escalation mechanisms can be applied to enhance the survivability of cloud computing systems. Numeric analysis of TBDM shows that by considering survivability preferences and attitudes (these directly impacts survivability actions), the TBDM method brings unpredictable survivability information closer to decision processes. This enables efficient execution of variable escalating survivability actions, which enables the Pi-CCSF’s decision system (DS) to focus upon decisions that achieve survivability outcomes under unpredictability imposed by UUUR

Data science for engineering design: State of the art and future directions

Abstract Engineering design (ED) is the process of solving technical problems within requirements and constraints to create new artifacts. Data science (DS) is the inter-disciplinary field that uses computational systems to extract knowledge from structured and unstructured data. The synergies between these two fields have a long story and throughout the past decades, ED has increasingly benefited from an integration with DS. We present a literature review at the intersection between ED and DS, identifying the tools, algorithms and data sources that show the most potential in contributing to ED, and identifying a set of challenges that future data scientists and designers should tackle, to maximize the potential of DS in supporting effective and efficient designs. A rigorous scoping review approach has been supported by Natural Language Processing techniques, in order to offer a review of research across two fuzzy-confining disciplines. The paper identifies challenges related to the two fields of research and to their interfaces. The main gaps in the literature revolve around the adaptation of computational techniques to be applied in the peculiar context of design, the identification of data sources to boost design research and a proper featurization of this data. The challenges have been classified considering their impacts on ED phases and applicability of DS methods, giving a map for future research across the fields. The scoping review shows that to fully take advantage of DS tools there must be an increase in the collaboration between design practitioners and researchers in order to open new data driven opportunities

Case-based reasoning and system design: An integrated approach based on ontology and preference modeling

This paper addresses the fulfillment of requirements related to case-based reasoning (CBR) processes for system design. Considering that CBR processes are well suited for problem solving, the proposed method concerns the definition of an integrated CBR process in line with system engineering principles. After the definition of the requirements that the approach has to fulfill, an ontology is defined to capitalize knowledge about the design within concepts. Based on the ontology, models are provided for requirements and solutions representation. Next, a recursive CBR process, suitable for system design, is provided. Uncertainty and designer preferences as well as ontological guidelines are considered during the requirements definition, the compatible cases retrieval, and the solution definition steps. This approach is designed to give flexibility within the CBR process as well as to provide guidelines to the designer. Such questions as the following are conjointly treated: how to guide the designer to be sure that the requirements are correctly defined and suitable for the retrieval step, how to retrieve cases when there are no available similarity measures, and how to enlarge the research scope during the retrieval step to obtain a sufficient panel of solutions. Finally, an example of system engineering in the aeronautic domain illustrates the proposed method. A testbed has been developed and carried out to evaluate the performance of the retrieval algorithm and a software prototype has been developed in order to test the approach. The outcome of this work is a recursive CBR process suitable to engineering design and compatible with standards. Requirements are modeled by means of flexible constraints, where the designer preferences are used to express the flexibility. Similar solutions can be retrieved even if similarity measures between features are not available. Simultaneously, ontological guidelines are used to guide the process and to aid the designer to express her/his preferences

A combined use of TRIZ methodology and eco-compass tool as a sustainable innovation model

The authors acknowledge Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT-MCTES) for its financial support via the project UIDB/00667/2020 (UNIDEMI).In recent years, there has been an increase in the adoption of quality tools by companies. As such, there has been a commitment to innovation by the organizations to obtain competitive advantages by the development of new products and technologies focused on the creation of economic value but also on delivering sustainability. This study aims to develop an application model of the inventive resolution theory in conjunction with the Eco-Compass ecological innovation tool, in order to allow solutions to be obtained systematically, and to present a performance increase of certain environmental parameters, promoting thus sustainable innovation. The case study research methodology is used to frame the research. The company under study is Nokia enterprise, located in Portugal, which offers a set of services related to telecommunications infrastructures. The unit of analysis is the department of transformation and continuous improvement, and the study illustrated the application of combined use of theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) and Eco-compass to develop innovative solutions systematically. The results show that it is possible to achieve innovation according to a certain level of established sustainable environmental parameters, while at the same time solving the identified inventive problem.publishersversionpublishe