This example illustrates the use of the simplified ARIZ made by one of the authors (SDS) during a recent one-day visit to a company that produces security paper for banknotes and other legal documents - a field in which he had no prior knowledge. A check of patents in the field revealed that this type of paper guards against counterfeiting by incorporating various security features, including additions such as glassy thread or magnetic or fluorescent substances. With this bit of background learned a day before the visit, he quickly applied TRIZ to the company's operation.

Step (a) Select a technical problem: The paper should have many different levels of security features without increasing the cost of the paper.

Step (b) Formulate a physical contradiction: The security features should be readily apparent--so that anyone can easily recognize that a bill is made from genuine paper--but they should also include "invisible" levels of detection, and it should be very difficult to make or copy such paper.

Step (c) Formulate an ideal solution: The material of the paper itself should provide the security features without any additions to it.

Step (d) Find resources for the solution: Presently the material of the security paper is cotton with a small amount ( about 5%) of chemicals in water solution between the cotton fibers. Therefore cotton, water and existing security features can be the resources of possible solutions. The technical and the physical contradictions can be resolved with the contradiction matrix and lists of effects. Some ideas that came immediately from this approach were: 1) Write information into the existing glassy or magnetic threads. (Presently the presence of magnetic threads is recognized by their hysteresis loop only.) 2) Make the security features in the paper dynamic (not static)to disguise their presence, perhaps by use of an additive whose signal becomes apparent only some period of time after it is activated. 3) Put fluorescent or other indicators in the water solution between the cotton fibers, rather than as separate additives. 4) Add indicators in the cotton when it is grown.

Step (e) Determine the "strength" of the solutions and choose the best one: The proposed solutions were discussed with the members of the company's R&D group, whose members had much experience in the security-paper field. Although they already knew about the possibility of writing information in the magnetic threads, they never considered the possibility of writing information in the glassy fibers. In addition, they never thought about other TRIZ-based solutions , but they accepted several of them as a basis for future research.

Step (f) Predict the development of the system considered within the problem. It is possible to conclude that the system will evolve to include dynamic security and security in the cotton itself. Here, the main system is the banknote, the security paper is one of two main subsystems (the other is the print on the banknote), and the supersystem is the banking system, which uses devices for checking the authenticity of a banknote. The subsystems of the paper itself are the major material (cotton) and additions (threads and other security features.) The four TRIZ-based solutions can increase a banknote's security without a change of the "print" subsystem. Some new security features can be recognized by existing devices; other would require the adaptation of new methods (such as detection of an ESR signal) .

Step (g) Analyze the solution process. The algorithm works well in this case.

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