State-of-the-Art and Trends of Computer-Aided Innovation Tools

Abstract

The design of competitive products requires meeting several market demands often contradictory, or at least very hard to achieve due to the hard time constrains imposed by the competitors. For example, from a structural point of view, mechanical parts must be light-weighted as well as stiff and strong according to the application requirements. The integration of CAE tools is the basic step towards the fulfillment of these demands, but it must be observed that such integration involves just detailed design phases, while only stand alone tools are available to support the designer during the preliminary product development activities. In facts, nowadays, the market offers several tools to improve designer creativity and problem solving capabilities with a systematic approach. Nevertheless, it is worth to notice that current Computer-Aided Inventing (CAI) applications cannot be integrated with other product development systems. In this paper, a survey of CAI systems is presented with a set of hints about thei r future development towards the integration with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) applications.