Editor | On 04, Nov 2010

Ellen Domb

Professor Romano Nanni started the program with an illustrated talk”:Anthropo-zoomorphic models and kinematic models in Leonardo da Vinci’s mechanizations” The illustrations were from da Vinci’s own notebooks, and they wre both technically fascinating and beautiful as works of art. Nanni showed us that biomimetics is not a new concept; it figured prominently in da Vinci’s work. Gaetano Cascini’s remarks at the end of Prof. Nanni’s paper put the studies into the TRIZ context, and suggested a method to be used for learning from historical studies.

Reminder: this is a personal report on the sessions that I participated in. For the full program, see www.etria.net.

Wessel Willems Wits from the University of Twente in the Netherlands presented “TRIZ based interface conflict resolving strategies for modular product architectures” developed with Tom Vaneker, president of ETRIA. He started with formal definitions of modular architecture and integral architecture, and the different design challenges of the 2 approaches, focusing on the different levels of complexity of interfaces. They model the system using function, behavior, and structure, using kinematics, dynamics, or both. The link to Simon Litwin’s talk yesterday was very clear, when Wits went into detail about the context-sensitive nature of function, and discussed how the same structure can be used to achieve different functions under different circumstances. An electronic design case study, emphasizing heat problems in design, was used to illustrate the method.

“TRIZ Tools to Enhance Risk Management was presented by Daniele was presented by Daniele Regazzoni and Davide Russo, from the host university at Bergamo. They based a 6-step method on TRIZ :subversion: methods as well as classical FMEA and reliability engineering. He illustrated the steps with examples of common products and explained how they plan to test the method in the next 2 years for product problems, with people of varied backgrounds, and, in the discussion, explained that they think that a modification may be needed for risk management of processes, and how this will be part of the research.

I was chairman of the next session, so my notes are much more limited than usual, and the papers were 10 minutes each. Caterin Rizzi spoke with a new hat – she is president of APEIRON, the Italian Society for Reason-based Innovation, and she presented the evolving mission and methods of APEIRON, to promote TRIZ to academia and to industry throughout Italy.

Hans-Peter Steinbacher and Stefan Huber presented their work “Supporting Innovation Processing with Integrated Information Models for Activity Support and Information Structuring.” Their work started with the observation of the chaotic nature of product development in small and medium enterprises, They created a system TIE to give SMEs structure for both the marketing and technology phases of product development, which creates re-usable knowledge for the organization’s future developments, as well as guidance through any particular project. They used TRIZ (particularly the contradiction matrix) to design the tools, becoming their own case study.

Victor Berdonosov and Elena Redkolis explained their concepts of “TRIZ-fractality of computer-aided software engineering systems.” Berdonosov used analogies to fractals in nature to explain fractals in information/knowledge systems, then showed how the TRIZ laws of technology evolution might apply at various levels of the fractals.

Sergei Ikovenko (frequent conference speaker and one one my first TRIZ teachers) spoke about using TRIZ for competitive patent circumnavigation and other patent strategies. Sergei showed how even very simple patents can be circumnavigated using the trimming concepts of TRIZ, with an excellent set of examples developed by Hyundai during recent workshops.