A Framework for Concept and its Testing on Patents

The development of a concept for a system is a key step towards creating the system's architecture. Most previous concept development approaches focus on the procedures for the conceptual design activity ‐ the sequence of activities and tasks. Our work is motivated by the desire to move the activities executed in a Concurrent Design Facility more upstream, in order to include choices and trade‐offs among potential system concepts in a digital environment. Therefore, the objective of this work is to develop a concept framework that can systematically represent the concept's constituents, their definitions and interconnections, such that it can be used in a computational environment. We propose a concept framework that is based on six assertions rooted in design theory, that lead to 33 entries in the framework. In order to test the completeness and utility of this framework, we have mapped eight selected US patents to the framework. Patents are a legally viable means for defending an invention, and therefore the patents must logically contain a description of the concept underlying the invention. For this small N study, we chose eight US patents that represent a broad spectrum of engineering systems and methods. The success of this mapping from patents to the proposed concept framework is a necessary condition to demonstrating the completeness and utility of the framework.