Abstraction and Generalization in Conceptual Design Process: Involving Safety Principles in TRIZ-SDA Environment

Abstraction and generalization are the processes of facilitating a specific problem to help designers solve problems efficiently. Abstraction and generalization reduce complexity and increase creativity. Both abstraction and generalization guide designers to focus on the key factors of a problem towards producing a broader solution perspective. This paper aims to discuss the use of abstraction and generalization in the conceptual design process within the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) environment, specifically, in TRIZ-SDA (Systematic Design Approach), which was developed to increase the understanding of safety principles in the conceptual design process. In addition, the aspects of abstraction and generalization advantages, their implementation in the design process, safety constraints and comparisons between abstraction and generalization are also reviewed. A case study of an aircraft component is used as the example in conducting abstraction and generalization in the safety approach

Knowledge based Approach for Formulating TRIZ Contradictions

AbstractThe article presents how to innovate a product using information extraction from patents literature to identify and overcome TRIZ contradictions. Each initial inventive situation has to be formulated in terms of contradictions in order to use the most effective tool for problem solving provided by the TRIZ theory.The authors propose, (1) an algorithm guiding the user to move from an indefinite problem situation to obtain a clearer problem formulation, following a process inspired to the ARIZ approach for fixing physical contradictions, and (2) some strategies and tools for selecting, acquiring and finally modeling the necessary information to improve the effectiveness in building the contradiction model.All those strategies have been implemented in a knowledge management tool called KOM, working as an automatic patent searching engine based on a functional oriented search. An exemplary application is presented to explain how KOM is integrated in the problem definition process

Preliminary Studies on Human Approaches to Inventive Design Tasks with a TRIZ Perspective

AbstractAmong the open research issues in the field of inventive design, a careful attention should be dedicated to the definition of means to measure and improve the efficiency of educational and training processes as well as to assess the benefits of the introduction of TRIZ expertise into R&D and engineering teams. In fact, while TRIZ methods and tools have gained a certain acknowledgment as a means to improve problem solving and inventive design skills, a dominant model about its introduction in an industrial organization is still missing. The paper presents a study aimed at measuring the impact of TRIZ learning (tools and logic) with respect to individuals’ talent. The paper proposes an original methodology to investigate human approaches to inventive design tasks: definition of the test (Sample group and control group, Inventive problems); evaluation criteria (Aptitude to follow a logical problem analysis path; Aptitude to explore various perspectives of the problem; Aptitude to generalization; Overall correctness of the problem analysis task; Completeness of the analysis); comparison and correlation criteria (Pearson correlation). The proposed investigation methodology is clarified through the description of an exemplary application in design courses at Politecnico di Milano and at the Università di Firenze

ARIZ85 and patent-driven knowledge support

AbstractThe growing complexity of technical solutions, which encompass knowledge from different scientific fields, makes necessary, also for multi-disciplinary working teams, the consultation of information sources. Indeed, tacit knowledge is essential, but often not sufficient to achieve a proficient problem solving process. Besides, the most comprehensive tool of the TRIZ body of knowledge, i.e. ARIZ, requires, more or less explicitly, the retrieval of new knowledge in order to entirely exploit its potential to drive towards valuable solutions.A multitude of contributions from the literature support various common tasks encountered when using TRIZ and requiring additional information; most of them hold the objective of speeding up the generation of inventive solutions thanks to the capabilities of text mining techniques. Nevertheless, no global study has been conducted to fully disclose the effective knowledge requirements of ARIZ. With respect to this deficiency, the present paper illustrates an analysis of the algorithm with the specific objective of identifying the different types of information needs that can be satisfied by patents. The results of the investigation lay bare the most significant gaps of the research in the field. Further on, an initial proposal is advanced to structure the retrieval of relevant information from patent sources currently not supported by existing methodologies and software applications, so as to exploit the vast amount of technical knowledge contained in there. An illustrative experiment sheds light on the relevance of control parameters as input terms for the definition of search queries aimed at retrieving patents sharing the same physical contradiction of the problem to be treated