Patent Data for Engineering Design: A Critical Review and Future Directions
This is an incremental review paper that synthesizes existing research for engineering design researchers and practitioners.
The paper reviews how patent data is used in engineering design research, highlighting opportunities from AI and data science to develop data-driven methods and tools, and it surveys literature to categorize contributions and suggest future directions.
Patent data have long been used for engineering design research because of its large and expanding size, and widely varying massive amount of design information contained in patents. Recent advances in artificial intelligence and data science present unprecedented opportunities to develop data-driven design methods and tools, as well as advance design science, using the patent database. Herein, we survey and categorize the patent-for-design literature based on its contributions to design theories, methods, tools, and strategies, as well as the types of patent data and data-driven methods used in respective studies. Our review highlights promising future research directions in patent data-driven design research and practice.