What are designers' objectives? To create an absolutely new product, revolutionary in its field.
To design a competitive product - more economic or with additional functions as compared with
analogs. To by-pass an existing patent without losing claimed advantages. To improve the
quality of an existing product. And so forth.
In any case, designing starts with determining a function to be performed by an object,
and each function can be realized by different methods. For a designer, it is useful to
get information about all or almost all methods in order to select the most suitable one
for a given situation.
A special tool (a computer program) has been developed, which helps a designer promptly
obtain a large number of ideas of performing a function, the ideas being essentially different.
Each idea proposes an elementary solution concept and a combination of ideas offers a complex
concept of building an engineering system. Having obtained a number of concepts, a designer
can begin analyzing them and selecting the most promising ones according to recommended criteria.
The method is based on the forecast tree of engineering system evolution. The tree is a structured
set of transformations of an engineering system. The transformations are arranged according to
the objective trends of technology evolution.
To generate a concept, an engineering system is
analyzed into elementary parts, which perform certain functions. For key elements, evolution
lines are created in accordance with the structure proposed by the basic evolution tree.
Building of the funtional model.
As a result, a designer obtains a series of various concepts. Among those concepts,
there are both existing ones (realized or patented) and new, synthesized by a designer.
Since a designer is normally well-informed about the situation in his field of interest,
it will not be difficult for him to mark the existing solutions on the evolution tree of
an element under analysis.
Fragment of the transformation tree for tool "Brush".
Fragment of the transformation tree for environment.
Skipped steps, line extensions not filled in by predecessors and a new combination of existing
solutions make the field of search for a designer. From among those concepts, a designer,
guided by the purposes of the problem, availability of resources and by parameters to be improved,
selects the most promising ones. The program offers him automatic selection of concepts according
to entered parameters. Or, in case of independent choice, it gives recommendations.
The program enables a designer to create a virtual technical world - the world of models of
function performance, from which one can build a model of any engineering system by replacing
it with a number of functions.
There is a prototype of the above program.
If you have interest in this program, contact us by the following address:
triztrainer@nm.ru (Nikolay Shpakovsky).
More detail:
Forecasting Maps of Engineering System Evolution
Tool for generating concepts
