TRIZ for systems architecting

TRIZ has gained interest over the past decades, as among others expressed by this conference. It is widely used and acknowledged for dealing with technical issues on component level. However, decisions on system level have a much greater impact than those on component level. Thus it is worthwhile to investigate applying TRIZ early in the design process. The article explores the benefits of and possibilities for applying TRIZ in the architecting phase. For this, system architecting is treated in short. An architecting approach presented earlier will be treated and elaborated upon. This approach connects the customer’s key drivers with functions to be performed. This approach provides leads for integrating TRIZ in the system architecting phase. These will be discussed in detail as the main subject of the paper. Examples, conclusions and ideas for future work complete the paper. © 2010 Published by Elsevier Ltd.