Inventive Design Method Research Articles

IPG kao novi metod za poboljšanje fleksibilnosti početne analize inventivnog dizajna

TRIZ method has long proven its value without appearing to the industrial world as inevitable. Design researchers have therefore addressed the limitations of the TRIZ method and have overcome them with more systematic approaches. Among these, the Inventive Design Method (IDM) has been the subject of several articles and put into practice in the industry. It is considered an improvement over TRIZ but still suffers from some drawbacks in terms of the time-consuming nature of its implementation. We focused on the IDM process by trying to both identify its areas of inefficiencies while attempting to preserve the quality of its deliverables. Our approach consists of applying the precepts of Lean to IDM. The result is the Inverse Problem Graph (IPG) method, inspired by IDM, but offering significant progress in reducing the time required to mobilize experts while preserving its inventive outcomes. This article outlines our approach for the construction of this new method.

An Approach to Identify the Readiness Level of a Solution Concept in the Inventive Design Method

It is generally known that the ranking of ideas during creative sessions creates two majors problems. The first is to undervalue a promising idea and thus wash away business priorities. The second is to overstate a false good idea that will be the underlying cause of unnecessary expenses. Although the subject of ranking ideas is spread and common in studies and research, it still poses an obvious contradiction: the level of definition of an idea must be precise to secure investments and imprecise to preserve its innovative role. In our research on this topic, we endeavored to highlight a new path that would both simplify engineers access to formal calculation (such as to give credibility to an idea by removing the blur surrounding it) while preserving potential inventive margins by identifying for each concept its degree of feasibility. However, this second part was not clearly defined in our research. In this paper, we present a complementary aspect of our approach. Its underlying idea is to associate each index to a TRL (Technical Readiness Level) that is likely to assess in an objective and formal way its maturity with a recognized scale in industrial environments. A case study and a discussion of the results of the contribution will be discussed at the end of the paper.

Starting from Patents to Find Inputs to the Problem Graph Model of IDM-TRIZ

TRIZ theory is primarily based on patent's observation and one of its extensions for complex situations is known as Inventive Design Method (IDM). This paper proposes a new approach of automatic retrieval of IDM concepts from patents. It mainly consists of using generic linguistic markers to locate and extract IDM related knowledge, such as problems, partial solutions and parameters, to automatically populate IDM Ontology. Lastly, a comparison is made between respective results of manual and automatic retrieval to assess the current accuracy of our approach.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) – A Solution for Knowledge Extraction from Patent Unstructured Data

Patents are valuable source of knowledge and are extremely important for assisting engineers and decisions makers through the inventive process. This paper describes a new approach of automatic extraction of IDM (Inventive Design Method) related knowledge from patent documents. IDM derives from TRIZ, the theory of Inventive problem solving, which is largely based on patent's observation to theorize the act of inventing. Our method mainly consists in using natural language techniques (NLP) to match and extract knowledge relevant to IDM Ontology. The purpose of this paper is to investigate on the contribution of NLP techniques to effective knowledge extraction from patent documents. We propose in this paper to firstly report on progress made so far in data mining before describing our approach.

Identifying and Reformulating Knowledge Items to Fit with the Inventive Design Method (IDM) Model for a Semantically-based Patent Mining

The analysis of initial situation is necessary when dealing with the complex engineering situation. Furthermore, innovation is the underlying foundation of technological advances and today's competitive economy. Patents contain important research and it is also possible to find within them a kind of history of the evolution of an artifact. Used effectively, patents can help to provide businesses and individuals work with innovative ideas. In this context, the engineers may very often need to analyze them in order to benefit from the knowledge contained therein to organize their inventive task. However, patents are lengthy and rich in technical terminology; analyzing patents may require a lot of human effort. Thus, automating the process is very timely. To facilitate this, several patent analysis tools have been created. There are also patent analysis tools dedicated to highlighting various values of tools, but very few of them are designed to extract information or knowledge contained in patents. This paper presents an ongoing research on knowledge extraction for the Inventive Design Method (IDM), which extends from TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving.

A Novel Approach to Architectural Problem Space Framing Using TRIZ- Based Contradiction Approach

In the absence of a specific form for representation, architectural contradictions are often ignored or treated by intuition, trial-and-error, or compromise. But, the set of methods and tools of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) would formulate, represent and solve these contradictions. This paper presents a part of an empirical study aimed to explore the possibility of adapting the “Contradiction” concept of TRIZ as a conceptual strategy for the early stages of an architectural design process. To obtain this objective, the architectural program of Project of Extension of INSA de Strasbourg was built in the form of Problems Graph of IDM-TRIZ (Inventive Design Method). This modeling aims to study the possibility of using the information provided by an architectural program to state architectural problems as Contradiction, and its contribution to the understanding of the problem space. Some limitations of the IDM-TRIZ for architectural applications are reported as well, and certain possible developments for Analysis of Initial Situation phase to fit better to the architectural programming process are suggested.

On Solution Concept Evaluation/Selection in Inventive Design

Inventive Design Method (IDM) is an extension of TRIZ. It was developed to solve classical TRIZ limits and address therefore wider and more complex problematic situations. The context of Solution Concepts developed with the aid of IDM is incomplete, conflicting and produces uncertain information. As a result, it becomes more difficult to evaluate then select which Solution Concepts to refine for more in-depth development. The early evaluation stage that is held by experts is usually an informal meeting and it involves generally instinctive judgments based on the experience of the experts. Thus it has a tendency to lack accuracy. The immediate reactions of experts have a strong influence on the decision and always tend to be negative when facing novel Solution Concept and time restrictions in the design cycle. This obvious reaction causes them to abandon Solution Concepts that are considered as unfeasible, too risky or outside of the primary focus of the design project. In order to prevent the rejection of good Solution Concepts or to screen out unfeasible ones, we proposed an approach to assist the designers in increasing confidence in the Solution Concept by providing a rapid estimation and/or exploration of the feasibility of a tested Solution Concept. The results obtained will be further used as inputs in the selection task. In this way, a designer acquires a certain degree of justification in bypassing expert intuition. Consequently, the evaluation and selection process can be implemented with accuracy. In this paper, we will report on current progress made on our ongoing research, and a case study will be given to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach.

A Software Framework to Support Engineering Analysis for Inventive Solution Concepts

In general, the result from conceptual design phase is described by text annotation and hand sketch. This information is not of a nature to provoke positive decisions for investment. Especially, in inventive design if decision maker (experts) have no time or little time, the result is often a good reason for projects to be abandoned (or placed on a shelve). Such situation is often due to their abstract description of a solution concept: often a rough graphical sketch and several sentences as written annotations. In parallel, computer support to conceptual design phase is not overwhelmed with many tools, they offer a useful tool for the concept generation but still poorly support investigating possible solutions, lacking of tools to size the geometry of the concepts and analyze their (physical) behavior. In order to give more chance for the solution concept to be selected and further developed in the next design phase. This paper will presents an approach and the software framework (RSC-Modeler) to support the need of tools for a type of conceptual design result: an inventive solution concept obtained from IDM-TRIZ (inventive design method based on TRIZ), by applied engineering analysis task and optimization techniques. Finally, a case study is given to demonstrate the practicability of the proposed approach and software framework.

Early feasibility evaluation of Solution Concepts in an Inventive Design Method Framework: Approach and support tool

The concept evaluation and selection process in the early stage of the Inventive Design Method (IDM) faces immediate reactions on the part of decision makers that usually exert a strong degree of influence and appear invariably to be negative when confronted with implementing an original solution that is subject to time restrictions in the design cycle. An obvious reaction to this is to abandon Solution Concepts that are considered unfeasible or overly risky. In parallel, computer support in this stage is still largely absent. In this paper we propose a method and tool to support evaluating and selecting a Solution Concept derived from the IDM framework. Our main objective is to determine how to prevent the rejection of good Solution Concepts and screen out unfeasible ones as early as possible. The proposed framework should be used as a decision-making aid and tool. Its purpose is to assist designers in increasing confidence in a Solution Concept by providing a rapid estimate or by exploring the feasibility of a tested Solution Concept. We submit a case study at the end of the paper to demonstrate the viability of the proposed framework.

Using patents to populate an inventive design ontology

TRIZ theory is largely based on patent's observation, and as we’ve learned from TRIZ, key issues (amongst others) like automatic contradiction extraction, accurately estimate a patent's level of Inventiveness, are still to be efficiently addressed. An evident bottleneck lies in the necessary cross disciplinary research to be undertaken between data/text mining algorithms, Design theories and methodologies and psychological aspects of creativity. This paper is firstly proposing to summarize key contributions and major research bottlenecks in patents usage in the scope of TRIZ-related practices. Then a positioning between TRIZ and our Inventive Design Method is exposed. A third part reports on our contribution, it consist in a framework aiming at extracting and representing know-how of domain experts and populating an already constructed Ontology of Inventive Design. This framework is using the notion of problem graph and polycontradictions. All these processes are discussed in order to interface with our software prototype: TRIZAcquisition.