A Rule-Based Heuristic Methodology for Su-Field Analysis in Industrial Engineering Design

Industrial engineering design is a crucial issue in manufacturing. To meet the competitive global market, manufacturers are continuously seeking solutions to design industrial products and systems inventively. Su-Field analysis, which is one of the TRIZ analysis tools for inventive design problems, has been used to effectively improve the performance of industrial systems. However, the inventive standards used for engineering design are summarized and classified according to a large number of patents in different fields. They are built on a highly abstract basis and are independent of specific application fields, making their use require much more technical knowledge than other TRIZ tools. To facilitate the use of invention standards, in particular to capture the uncertainty or imprecision described in the standards, this paper proposes a rule-based heuristic approach. First, Su-Field analysis ontology and fuzzy analysis ontology are constructed to represent precise and fuzzy knowledge in the process of solving inventive problems respectively. Then, SWRL (Semantic Web Rule Language) reasoning and fuzzy reasoning are executed to generate heuristic conceptual solutions. Finally, we develop a software prototype and elaborate the resolution of "Auguste Piccard's Stratostat" in the prototype.