Dominique Scaravetti

Aided Decision-Making for an Embodiment Design Problem

In the early phases of a traditional design process, many decisions are made by designers. For that purpose, they take advantage of their experience and company knowledge. These decisions are necessary in a sequential design process but may hide many embodiment solutions. Moreover, designers often use a trial-and-error mode to find a working combination of standard elements. To overcome these difficulties, a decision support system based on constraint programming is proposed. The object of the design process set out in this paper is to facilitate the embodiment design phase by avoiding a-priori decision making and searching for feasible architectures in which all the points of view of the various participants in the project are taken into account. A preliminary search of structuring characteristics of the design problem is necessary and is detailed here. This methodology is applied to embodiment design of the automatic weight-winding system of a monumental clock. To determine the most interesting solutions , objectives and performance indicators are entered. Finally, the benefits of our approach are discussed.

Design space exploration in embodiment design: an application to the design of aircraft air conditioners

The embodiment design of aeronautic systems proves to be a difficult design phase due to the variability in the system environment; the design is often constrained by atmospheric conditions. These atmospheric conditions appear to be highly variable according to the flight phases of the aircraft. The difficulty when designing air-conditioning systems for civil aircrafts is also inherent to the complexity of the coupling of the nonlinear physical phenomena inside of these systems (multi-physics, multi-scaling). Therefore, the design space appears to be very broad and quite difficult to explore. Embodiment design choices are relating to continuous and discrete design variables while the system effectiveness is extremely sensitive to most of these design variables. There is a lack of tools to support the investigation of the design exploration space and designer decisions at early stages of the design process. In this paper, a method is proposed to generate feasible embodiments and manage the compromise between various design requirements. A digital tool based on the meta-heuristic of Genetic Algorithms (Gas) has been developed to investigate the design problem. The selection of non-dominated solutions (Pareto) is used to identify relevant values for design variables and to facilitate choices among the design solutions of the air conditioning system.

A new method for extracting knowledge from patents to inspire designers during the problem-solving phase

ABSTRACT Nowadays, patents are more than an industrial property protection, they constitute a considerable source of information. Several approaches deal with the extraction of pertinent information from patents, some of them translate that information into useful knowledge for problem-solving purposes. However, very few methods use a physical approach and a consistent analysis of the main function in the problem definition phase. This paper proposes a new method to inspire designers with ideas and analogous solutions. The objective is to contribute to solve complex technical problems by exploiting knowledge found in patent documents. The method is divided into three sections: problem definition, research and analysis, and innovation. The first two sections use iteratively a knowledge base formed by pertinent keywords related to the problem context, physical keywords from functional decomposition and physical analysis, and technological keywords recovered through patent analysis. In the third section, interesting patents are classified in a structured discovery matrix from the physical phenomena involved which are crossed in accordance with the related techniques found. The method is supported by a physical effects database of energy conversion and by evolution trends of technical systems. A deep offshore biphasic separator illustrates the method.

Exploring design spaces in the search for embodiment design solutions and decision support

The design of an air-conditioning system for a commercial aircraft, which functions in various life cycle stages, proves difficult because atmospheric conditions differ greatly according to the flight phase. This paper proposes the use of constraint programming in the exploration of design spaces and the search for feasible embodiments. This approach produces the best design compromises between various design objectives, whatever the life cycle stage. The entire design space is explored for potential solutions and their performance assessed, thus allowing for decision support at the end of the embodiment design phase

Finding Innovative Technical Solutions in Patents Through Improved Evolution Trends

Patents represent a reservoir richly endowed with exploitable technical information, where a structured exploration of inventions can unveil essential knowledge for solving industrial problems. Several authors exploit patents using the evolution laws of the TRIZ theory to anticipate technological leaps, categorize patents in a TRIZ perspective, forecast technology, etc. TRIZ laws can be completed with Polovinkin’s rules, design rules, better known as “design heuristics,” and the rules of the art of engineering (engineering best practices). In this chapter, we propose evolution trends composed of all these elements and presented in the form of cards to assist users. After selecting pertinent patents, they can be classified into discovery matrices and analyzed in a timeline classification structured according to their technological branches. The evolution trends enable us to decipher the evolution in inventions being followed or to be followed by each technological branch. An in-depth analysis of several technological branches linked to the technical problem in question allows us to inspire users with original ideas, identify opportunities for innovation, and propose hybrid solutions. To illustrate our approach, we look for possible evolutions of current, deep offshore biphasic separation systems.