IngeniousTRIZ: An automatic ontology-based system for solving inventive problems

With the development of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), different models and knowledge sources were established in order to solve different types of inventive problems. These knowledge sources with different levels of abstraction are all built independently of the specific application field, and require extensive knowledge about different engineering domains. In order to facilitate the use of these TRIZ models and knowledge sources, an intelligent knowledge management system – IngeniousTRIZ was developed in this research. On the one hand, according to the TRIZ knowledge sources ontologies, this system offers to the users the relevant knowledge sources of the model they are building. On the other hand, the system has the ability to fill “automatically” the models of the other knowledge sources. Firstly, the TRIZ user chooses a TRIZ knowledge source to work for an abstract solution. Then, the items of other knowledge sources, which are similar with the selected items of the first knowledge source, are obtained based on semantic similarity calculated in advance. With the help of these similar items and the heuristic physical effects, other concept solutions are generated through ontology inference. In order to show this whole process, the resolution of the case of the “diving fin” in IngeniousTRIZ system is elaborated in detail.