An ontology-based approach for inventive problem solving

With the development of the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), different knowledge sources were established in order to solve different types of inventive problems, such as 40 inventive principles for eliminating the technical contradictions. These knowledge sources with different levels of abstraction are all built independent of the specific application field, and require extensive knowledge about different engineering domains. In order to facilitate the use of the TRIZ knowledge sources, this paper explores a new inventive problem solving approach based on ontologies. In this approach, the TRIZ users start solving an inventive problem with the TRIZ knowledge source of their choice to obtain an abstract solution. According to the selected items of that first knowledge source, the similar items of other knowledge sources are obtained based on the semantic similarity calculated in advance. Considering that all the TRIZ knowledge sources are described as short-texts, the missing links among the TRIZ knowledge sources are defined based on short-text semantic similarity. At the same time, the ontology reasoning mechanism, deployed on Protégé and JESS, is used to provide heuristic solutions dynamically for TRIZ users. The case of a “Space Boiler” is used to show this ontology-based inventive problem solving process in detail.