TRIZ theory and automotive safety systems development

Engineering design tasks involve a wide range of theories and methods. Most of the existing engineering practices aim at mapping given requirements and demands into a list of specifications describing a feasible product. Nevertheless, formal design theories are only available at later design phases, which are performed after a feasible design concept has been proposed and verified. The bottleneck of new product development projects usually lies in the generation of initial feasible concepts. Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), originated in Russia, was developed to address this issue of generating the initial concepts. In this thesis, we analyze the development and evolution of automotive safety systems with TRIZ. Our objective is two-fold. First, we demonstrate that TRIZ can be successfully applied to the process of automotive safety system development, which has never been done before. TRIZ tools such as Contradiction Table and Su-field problem formulation are used for this purpose. Secondly, we use TRIZ as a technical forecasting tool in predicating the future trend of automotive safety system development. This task is conducted through patent search and S-curves. With S-curve, it helps us to identify the current development stage of a certain automotive safety system and where the new direction is heading into.Dept. of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .W368. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 44-01, page: 0511. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2005