Product and Organism Aspects for Scalable Systematic Biologically-Inspired Design

Abstract Although Biologically-Inspired Design is gaining popularity, state-of-the-art approaches for systematic Biologically-Inspired Design are still limited by the required interactive work which is proportional to the applied biological database size. This interactive work, depending on the adopted methodology, might encompass model instantiation for each strategy in the biological database, classification into a predefined scheme, or extensive result filtering. To address this bottleneck, a scalable approach to systematic Biologically-Inspired Design, with the potential to leverage large numbers of biological strategies, is presented. Central to the approach are a set of Organism Aspects that form a conceptual representation of the biological domain. Inspired by the theory of inventive problem solving, this conceptual representation is an abstraction that facilitates knowledge reuse. The proposed Organism Aspects information structure supports a number of new systematic innovation functionalities aimed at assisting designers looking for bio-inspiration. Amongst these functionalities are the following: identification of a set of organisms relevant for the designer, a relevance sorted list of biological documents, and in-text annotation to facilitate cross-domain analogy identification.