A cooperative multi-agent platform for invention based on patent document analysis and ontology

We propose a cooperative multi-agent platform to support the invention process based on the patent document analysis. It helps industrial knowledge managers to retrieve and analyze existing patent documents and extract structure information from patents with the aid of ontology and natural language processing techniques. It allows the invention process to be carried out through the cooperation and coordination among software agents delegated by the various domain experts in the complex industrial R&D environment. Furthermore, it integrates the patent document analysis with the inventive problem solving method known as TRIZ method that can suggest invention directions based on the heuristics or principles to resolve the contradictions among design objectives and engineering parameters. We chose the patent invention for chemical mechanical polishing (CMP) as our case study. However, the platform and techniques could be extended to most cooperative invention domains. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.