Supporting Assessment of Novelty of Design Problems Using Concept of Problem SAPPhIRE
This work addresses the tedious and time-consuming manual assessment of problem novelty in design, offering an automated solution for researchers and practitioners in engineering design.
The paper tackles the challenge of assessing the novelty of design problems by proposing an automated framework that measures novelty as the minimum distance from a reference database using the SAPPhIRE model and textual similarity, demonstrating its applicability by comparing current stakeholder problems with historical patent data.
This paper proposes a framework for assessing the novelty of design problems using the SAPPhIRE model of causality. The novelty of a problem is measured as its minimum distance from the problems in a reference problem database. The distance is calculated by comparing the current problem and each reference past problem at the various levels of abstraction in the SAPPhIRE ontology. The basis for comparison is textual similarity. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework, The current set of problems associated with an artifact, as collected from its stakeholders, were compared with the past set of problems, as collected from patents and other web sources, to assess the novelty of the current set. This approach is aimed at providing a better understanding of the degree of novelty of any given set of current problems by comparing them to similar problems available from historical records. Since manual assessment, the current mode of such assessments as reported in the literature, is a tedious process, to reduce time complexity and to afford better applicability for larger sets of problem statements, an automated assessment is proposed and used in this paper.