Design for invention: annotation of functional geometry interaction for representing novel working principles

Abstract

In some mechanical engineering devices the novelty or inventive step of a patented design relies heavily upon how geometric features contribute to device functions. Communicating the functional interactions between geometric features in existing patented designs may increase a designer's awareness of the prior art and thereby avoid conflict with their emerging design. This paper shows how functional representations of geometry interactions can be developed from patent claims to produce novel semantic graphical and text annotations of patent drawings. The approach provides a quick and accurate means for the designer to understand the patent that is well suited to the designer's natural way of understanding the device. Through several example application cases we show the application of a detailed representation of functional geometry interactions that captures the working principle of familiar mechanical engineering devices described in patents. A computer tool that is being developed to assist the designer to understand prior art is also described.

Automated Functional Analysis of Patents for Producing Design Insight

“…The Functional Analysis Diagram (FAD) for example, first disclosed by Invention Machine Corp (Devoino et al, 2005), has been developed into Kinetic Functional Analysis Diagram (KFAD) (Lee et al, 2013) by adding representations of movement transitions to assist mechanical design; and combined with Value Engineering and Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) to improve product reliability and cost (Michalakoudis et al, 2016). FAD has been applied in the patent analysis (Atherton et al, 2017), being further developed (e.g. into FAD+) to incorporate invention hierarchy relationships that use a domain-specific ontology to enable conflict analysis between emerging design and prior art (Jiang et al, 2017(Jiang et al, , 2018.…”

“…However, designers do not often engage with patents, especially in the early stages of design, as analysis of patents requires considerable effort and expertise to extract the technical information buried within the legal terminologies used (Kim et al, 2008;Tseng et al, 2007). In previous work, the authors developed a graphical representation of invention working principles built upon Functional Analysis Diagram (FAD) (Aurisicchio et al, 2013), intended to represent a patented invention more succinctly for designers (Atherton et al, 2017). The information required for these graphical representations is identified and extracted manually from a patent, which is timeconsuming and not practical for analysing a large number of patents.…”

Evaluation of a Visual Tool for Early Patent Infringement Detection During Design

“…Our visual tool represents the front-end for a patent analysis framework that focuses on mechanical engineering and is based on a semantic database. The database includes mechanical products covered by patents, and it is composed of a patent functional representation and a domain-specific ontology [2]. The functional representation aims at expressing patents in terms of geometric features and their functional interactions.…”

“…Based on this situation, during a project on intellectual property defence we were involved in [11], we set up a visual software tool to be used unobtrusively by designers at any stage of the design process, in order to give them useful and reliable information for deciding whether to steer their design away from potential patent infringements [17]. The visual tool is based on portable web technologies, and relies on an available semantic database for patent representation [2].…”

Design for invention: a framework for identifying emerging design–prior art conflict

“…In mechanical engineering, functions are mainly realised by combinations of interrelationships between physical effects, geometric and material characteristics, known as the working principles (Pahl and Beitz 2006). In some mechanical designs geometric details play an important role in achieving device working principles, for example, corkscrews and beverage cans rely heavily on key geometric details for their intended function (Atherton et al 2017). In this case, physical effects and material characteristics described can be considered as attributes of geometric features decided by the designer.…”