Evaluating the impact of Idea-Inspire 4.0 on analogical transfer of concepts

Abstract

The biological domain has the potential to offer a rich source of analogies to solve engineering design problems. However, due to the complexity embedded in biological systems, adding to the lack of structured, detailed, and searchable knowledge bases, engineering designers find it hard to access the knowledge in the biological domain, which therefore poses challenges in understanding the biological concepts in order to apply these concepts to engineering design problems. In order to assist the engineering designers in problem-solving, we report, in this paper, a web-based tool called Idea-Inspire 4.0 that supports analogical design using two broad features. First, the tool provides access to a number of biological systems using a searchable knowledge base. Second, it explains each one of these biological systems using a multi-modal representation: that is, using function decomposition model, text, function model, image, video, and audio. In this paper, we report two experiments that test how well the multi-modal representation in Idea-Inspire 4.0 supports understanding and application of biological concepts in engineering design problems. In one experiment, we use Bloom's method to test “analysis” and “synthesis” levels of understanding of a biological system. In the next experiment, we provide an engineering design problem along with a biological-analogous system and examine the novelty and requirement-satisfaction (two major indicators of creativity) of resulting design solutions. In both the experiments, the biological system (analogue) was provided using Idea-Inspire 4.0 as well as using a conventional text-image representation so that the efficacy of Idea-Inspire 4.0 is tested using a benchmark.

Semantic Networks for Engineering Design: A Survey

“…The US patent database contains useful technical knowledge from patents but was not in the form of semantic networks. Idea Inspire 4.0 (Siddharth and Chakrabarti, 2018) is an idea generation support tool providing access to biological information in a human-curated knowledge base.…”

Method to Retrieve Bionic Morphologies by Spectral Matching for the Design Space

“…For instance, to redesign a wheel, the keyword search must include "to move" and "locomotion" which will yield suggestions like "flagella of bacteria" and the "rolling locomotion of the moth caterpillar". Furthermore, it was found that adequate expertise with these models are required to add data to these databases [22].…”

Modeling and structuring design rationale to enable knowledge reuse

“…The literature on FR does not provide evidence using examples that the model could be used for decomposing objects. The latest developments on the SAPPhIRE model indicate that it can facilitate the decomposition of complex systems …”

“…The proposed model describes state transitions according to physical effects, unlike IBIS‐FAD. The use of a causality model in View III allows learning patterns across several abstractions and analogically map from one case to the other; the ability of SAPPhIRE model to do so is empirically validated by Siddharth and Chakrabarti …”