The scientific background of Skidbladnir is known as "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving;" in English abbreviated as TIPS, in German and Russian known as TRIZ. The theory has its origins in 1946 with Prof. Altschuller, who at the time was a patent engineer for the army.
The TIPS theory is based upon the principle that independent of scientific discipline or industrial area, abstracted problems and their solutions usually repeat themselves. When analyzing about 40.000 extraordinarily successful patents, it was found that all of these were based on roughly 40 different solution principles only.
Another basic principle of this theory is, that the evolution of technical systems is following certain tendencies and that essential innovation often requires an influx of scientific results from another area.
The most well-known project to solve this and other problems with software is probably the TechOptimizer, which - like all the other applications in this field - is proprietary and very expensive.
The following provides a very simple example for this:
1. luminescent material converts UV light into visible light;
2. fine ground/spread metal inhibits luminescence;
3. before a moving part of an engine fails, small bits of metal are released into its oil.
Combining these three facts easily leads to the idea that adding luminescent material to oil will allow determining when certain parts of machinery need to be replaced before they fail, because the luminescence in the oil will stop.
Real situations are often much more complex and require a large database of effects, that has to be assembled from technical literature, which is a tedious and work-intensive task.
Skidbladnir was written in C++ (Qt), Perl, PHP and MySQL and it is published under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Compared to proprietary projects, Skidbladnir may have comparably few effects, but it already contains software effects; possibly as the first of its kind.
Help is very welcome in any form; especially developers and users who give feedback are needed. Also more data about effects and access to real-life problems would be appreciated.
|A short introduction into the computer - aided - inventing|