TRIZ 40 Inventive Principles Classification through FBS Ontology

Altshuller screened patents in order to find out what kind of contradictions were resolved or dissolved by the inventors/inventions and the way this had been achieved. From this he developed a set of 40 inventive principles. Since the first Altshuller's formulation [1], the inventive principles have been largely used and studied by academic institutions and private companies operating in the product innovation field. Research on inventive principles is focused on improving principle definitions by providing a huge list of examples to be used as analogy and customizing definitions for specific domains (i.e. informatics, business, chemical, manufacturing and more others). Meanwhile, many authors worked on classifications and comparisons with other design models or problem solving methods. One of the reasons for this interest can be found in an attempt to reduce the degree of subjectivity in the use of this tool. This problem can be attributed to the high degree of abstraction with which many principles are written, inducing inevitably to a certain freedom of interpretation. In some cases, during the problem approaching, this ambiguity may lead the user not to fully capture the inventive essence. The goal of this work is to analyze all 40 principles from a new design perspective, i.e. the FBS (Functional Behaviour Structure theory) [2], in order to overcome their ambiguity and ameliorate their efficacy. New definitions have been conceived to make the user aware if he/she is acting on the function, the behavior or the structure of the device. This analysis has revealed that in many cases there is already a perfect matching between original Altshuller's definitions and FBS logic. That means a large part of the principles forces the user to act both on the function, the behaviour and the structure of the system. Where the matching with FBS is not complete, this classification/reformulation can help to enlarge the range of its interpretation/suggestions broadening the solution space. The potentiality of this work has been tested on a set of industrial case studies solved by 40 mechanical and management engineering students and by a group of TRIZ experts.