Research scholars in IIT/IISc/University departments
have the unenviable task of achieving the following goals during their
Research/Development/Ph.D. work, (Italics show
scope/difficulties)
(2) Visualize/Design/Construct an apparatus/measurement
system
(In congested lab space, under paucity of funds)
(3) Do a lot of experiments to Setup/Calibrate/Standardize/Commission
the equipment
(In the presence of all kinds of variations/Noisy conditions)
(4) Get repeatable/reliable results
(After making the equipment "robust" against noise)
(5) Publish results in reputed journals
(Have to be one-up on recently published literature)
(6) Write Documents/Reports/Thesis
(While referring all the time to published literature/motivation/scope/results
etc)
So far, nothing is said about the quality of Ph.D.! What use is a Ph.D. if it has not addressed a 'difficult problem' nor offered 'new/novel' results to the same? All the future depends on the thesis being 'very good' (which is really an illusive adjective).
I have put together a tandem of techniques called
"TRIZ-Inventive Problem Solving" and "Taguchi Method" to improve the chances
of getting "novel results to difficult problems". These 2 techniques are,
(1) TRIZ : to find/define the "difficult problem" and propose several "inventive solution concepts". (After a decent "patent" literature survey)
(2) TAGUCHI Method: to experimentally optimize one
of the solution concepts, by working on the "existing" experimental setup/measurement
system to get the "best" results. Taguchi's 9 or 18 experiments are the
minimal orthogonal set of experiments to get results within matter of weeks
(which would otherwise take months!). Detailed experiments can then be
done using these 'best' settings.
What does the course offer?
This course introduces all the main TRIZ tools so that you can first identify the inventive problem and then find several innovative/inventive solutions for the same. One of the inventive solution concepts is chosen for implementation.
The course also teaches "Taguchi method",
which is aimed at optimizing a process through experimentation over a range
of process control parameter settings. It determines the 'best' settings
of parameters that will make the process 'robust' in spite of unavoidable
variations in control parameters and noise.
go back to Apte's Web-page http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~apte
go to Taguchi Page http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~apte/CV_PRA_TAGUCHI.htm
go to TRIZ page http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~apte/CV_PRA_TRIZ.htm
go to Why-Triz-Tag Abstract
http://www.ee.iitb.ac.in/~apte/WhyTrizTag-Abs.htm