Extraction and linking of motivation, specification and structure of inventions for early design use

Novel design creations often exist in the form of patents. It is well acknowledged that patents are a great source of design inspiration, therefore designers are encouraged to engage patents early in the design process. Studies of patent analysis have been carried out to benefit engineering design activities such as patent classification, technology forecasting, idea generation and emerging design-prior art comparison. However, the design intent behind inventions has received little attention in patent analysis. Designers can gain better design insight by looking at a patent from a systematic perspective starting from design intent to principal solutions. In this paper, an approach is proposed to extract and link the knowledge conveyed within patent descriptive sections to typical early engineering design stages, namely Motivation, Specification and Structure. This knowledge is then conceptualised into TRIZ engineering parameters and reconciled functional basis to enable cross-patent analysis. When compared to expert analysis, the proposed approach achieves an average of 63% accuracy with respect to Motivation, 56% with respect to Specification function and 44% with respect to Specification flow. Potential applications of such linking for early design use are then demonstrated through a prototype knowledge network.