Technology Knowledge Graph for Design Exploration: Application to Designing the Future of Flying Cars

To pursue innovation, design engineers need to continuously exploit the knowledge in their design domain and explore other relevant knowledge around the domain. While many methods and tools have been developed to retrieve knowledge within a given design domain, e.g., flying cars, knowledge discovery beyond the domain for innovation remains a challenge, and relevant methods are under-developed. Herein, we introduce a methodology to use a technology knowledge graph (TKG), which covers sematic-level knowledge in all technology fields defined in the international patent classification system, to retrieve the existing engineering knowledge in a domain and discover engineering concepts around the domain for future design considerations and innovation. We demonstrate the TKG-based methodology by applying it to explore the future designs of flying cars, an emerging domain with high uncertainty despite growing prospects.