Excesses in Engineering Systems: A Helpful Resource

Abstract

Excessiveness (redundancy) is often intentionally introduced in an engineering system (ES) in order to improve its reliability. In many cases, however, various types of excessiveness existing in an ES can be a good resource for improving the ES, whether by reducing its cost, minimizing its environmental impact, improving its compatibility with other systems, or something else. Yet modern TRIZ does not fully utilize this resource. For example, in Function Analysis (FA), although a useful function’s excessive level of performance is seen as a disadvantage, this fact is normally ignored. Additionally, the cost and quantity of substances, energy and other useful resources spent in the system are evaluated subjectively and their excessive consumption is frequently classified as “acceptable” (this could be called “hidden excessiveness”), which in the analysis leads to a loss of some key problems and related solutions. In this paper, the author is trying to enhance TRIZ Resource Analysis and FA, by (1) introducing an objective approach to identifying different hidden excesses in the ES, which includes the excessive amount of energy, substances, and other resources (e.g. bandwidth, processing power, etc.) consumed by the system, and (2) by including these excesses in the TRIZ Resource Analysis. Four case studies demonstrate the practical application of this approach in the areas of machining operations, video displays, Wi-Fi systems and computer simulation algorithms.