Revealing the Numeric Signature of Contradictions by a Semi-automatic Analysis of Product Data

This study is part of a new product design project. Its scope is the enhancement of a hybrid boiler, which is an innovative product using different energy sources (natural gas and electricity with a share of renewable energy). One of the key points in this project is to make this boiler more communicative by wiring it to an information system. This system called “Thermibox” gives us a way of monitoring boiler parameters when it works on the field in a real use case. Moreover, as a complete information system, the Thermibox could be a significant link between the products, the customer and our company which designs and manufactures the product.Within TRIZ framework, the goal of this study is to show a new way of documenting expected contradictions and finding physical and technical contradictions that were not expected while designing the product by using a smart monitoring system. The main purpose is to define a set of parameters that could have a correlation and then find how they interact by monitoring them and using algorithms taken from data mining. The system should also be able to classify the contradictions according to their frequency or their intensity and help us finding the available resources to solve them.On the one hand, this tool could give us the necessary information to design a new product as soon as we have a functional prototype, or to improve an existing one for a new version. The created information should be an adequate input to roll out the TRIZ process and work on contradictions that would have been hard to identify in the normal way. On the other hand, if the contradictions we brought to light can be formalized easily, the balance between system parameters could be used in an active way to optimize the regulation and parameterization of the product.