Knowledge based approach for formulating TRIZ contradictions

The article presents how to innovate a product using information extraction from patents literature to identify and overcome TRIZ contradictions. Each initial inventive situation has to be formulated in terms of contradictions in order to use the most effective tool for problem solving provided by the TRIZ theory. The authors propose, (1) an algorithm guiding the user to move from an indefinite problem situation to obtain a clearer problem formulation, following a process inspired to the ARIZ approach for fixing physical contradictions, and (2) some strategies and tools for selecting, acquiring and finally modeling the necessary information to improve the effectiveness in building the contradiction model. All those strategies have been implemented in a knowledge management tool called KOM, working as an automatic patent searching engine based on a functional oriented search. An exemplary application is presented to explain how KOM is integrated in the problem definition process.