Assisting Decisions in Inventive Design of Complex Engineering Systems

AbstractAdopting relevant decisions in engineering design of multidisciplinary problematic is often perceived as a critical issue in industry. This situation becomes even more critical when in inventive design context since decisions lead R&D teams towards unusual directions that, by nature, expose the company to risky investments. IDM-TRIZ is an advanced framework proposed to address the issue of representing multidisciplinary and complex situations to facilitate TRIZ use in inventive design projects. One of its tool “problem graph” has been designed to link expert knowledge representations and automatic extraction of populations of contradictions. This first step nevertheless presents a limitation; it doesn’t help project leaders to properly estimate the incidences of their decisions when engaging inventive activities to solve a specific problem. This paper addresses this issue and proposes an enhanced methodological process that is handling dynamic multiple graphical representations based on computed project data's exploitation. It provides relevant proofs that, in comparison with a traditional TRIZ approach, we have significantly improved the robustness of R&D decisions. In addition, we illustrate our methodology using a case study conducted in airspace industry (helicopter assembly complexity) to present and validate our hypothesis