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.