A TRIZ-Case Based Reasoning approach supporting innovation in Process Engineering

In a future economic environment that is both competitive and constrained, process engineering must provide technological improvements to ensure progress on all aspects of sustainable development. These industrial and technical challenges can be met through innovation. Knowledge, science and technology are the essential underpinnings of the innovation process. Whether the source of this knowledge is external ("open innovation") or internal, the company seeks to transform and adapt it to its own problems, in order to produce new advances. Innovation is therefore one of the levers of a company's competitiveness, but it needs to be repeated and nurtured if it is to survive. Exploiting the experience and knowledge gained from previous designs can significantly reduce lead times, since certain choices no longer need to be made or questioned. In this context, approaches and tools dedicated to innovative design are needed to meet these challenges.

Among the arsenal of innovative design support methods, TRIZ theory (Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving) is used in process engineering. Although necessary, TRIZ methods and tools are not sufficient, and need to be integrated or even coupled with other approaches to build an inventive design support method. This article therefore proposes an approach based on coupling TRIZ and case-based reasoning (RàPC). The aim of this coupling is to provide a tool for innovative design, with a view to improving and accelerating the proposal of inventive solutions to technical problems. Thanks to RàPC, the addition of a resolution memory to TRIZ makes it possible to capitalize on the new knowledge generated during the design process. What's more, the complementarity demonstrated between TRIZ and RàPC looks promising for future developments, thanks to ongoing advances in information and communication technologies and in theoretical approaches to innovation. The combined introduction of these advances in and at the service of TRIZ-RàPC coupling has led to the creation of a new generation of tools (§ 4 ).