Supporting Assessment of Novelty of Design Problems Using Concept of Problem SAPPhIRE

This paper proposes a framework for assessing the novelty of design problems using the SAPPhIRE model of causality. The novelty of a problem is measured as its minimum distance from the problems in a reference problem database. The distance is calculated by comparing the current problem and each reference past problem at the various levels of abstraction in the SAPPhIRE ontology. The basis for comparison is textual similarity. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework, The current set of problems associated with an artifact, as collected from its stakeholders, were compared with the past set of problems, as collected from patents and other web sources, to assess the novelty of the current set. This approach is aimed at providing a better understanding of the degree of novelty of any given set of current problems by comparing them to similar problems available from historical records. Since manual assessment, the current mode of such assessments as reported in the literature, is a tedious process, to reduce time complexity and to afford better applicability for larger sets of problem statements, an automated assessment is proposed and used in this paper.