A scalable approach for the integration of large knowledge repositories in the Biologically-Inspired Design process

Abstract

Many applications of Biologically-Inspired Design (BID) are well-known and research is increasingly focusing on methodologies towards systematic BID. However, currently no ideation tool exists that is able to leverage the large textual biological resources in a scalable way to propose a selection of biological strategies that are interesting for a specific design problem under focus. This paper first identifies the main bottleneck preventing the realization of such a scalable BID ideation tool by analyzing the state-of-the-art in systematic BID. It is observed that most work focuses on developing detailed models of, both biological and engineering systems, which enable support during knowledge transfer between the two domains. However, the automated instantiation of these models for a large collection of biological strategies currently remains an open question and domain experts are necessary to complete this time-consuming and expensive task. Therefore, a new approach is proposed that uses a conceptual representation of the biological domain to identify candidate biological strategies as input for the transfer phase.