Integrated Use of TRIZ Tools in Systematic Conceptual Design

Among the design methods available in literature, the German approach based on Functional Decomposition and Morphology (FDM) is one of the most taught in academia. However, notwithstanding the academic success, some scholars argued that such a method lacks a comprehensive support to the generation of innovative solutions. Due to its inventive potentialities, TRIZ has been often addressed as a potential aid to improveFDMeven though the two approaches are characterized by non-negligible differences. An alternative to FDM has been recently proposed,which overcomes someFDMflaws and integrates the potentialities of TRIZ. It is based on the formulation of the design tasks in terms of problems and solutions. The new approach is called “Problem-Solution-Network” (PSN), where the main graphical tool is a hierarchical network of problems and solutions, whose construction follows a set of specific rules. The objective of this paper is to show the potentialities of the PSN-TRIZ integration. The paper presents a literature review of the background related to the integration of FDMand TRIZ, themain features and constructs of PSN and its integration with TRIZ tools to show how the approach works.