A Patent Granted on ExaWizards’ Technology for One-Sweep Optimization of Product Quality, Cost, and Environmental Impacts —Looped multiple models predict and optimize to find best combination of raw materials and manufacturing process
ExaWizards Inc., a company that develops AI-enabled services to solve social issues (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director & President: Ko Ishiyama; hereafter, “ExaWizards”) announced today that a patent has issued on its machine learning model that manages the raw materials and the manufacturing process and optimizes the product quality, cost, and environmental impacts in one sweep.
ExaWizards believes that the patented technology will prove beneficial for the R&D and product development in many industries.
Development of a product, for instance, requires studies on a vast number of combinations of candidate raw materials and manufacturing processes before the targeted product quality is achieved finally. However, limited time to delivery and availability of human resources make it difficult to complete the studies exhaustively.These are true in any industry, including consumer goods, industrial goods, manufacturing and healthcare industries.
This new technology of ExaWizards, when used after certain amounts of experimental data are accumulated, provides opportunities to determine with minimum efforts the raw materials and the manufacturing process that will help attain better product quality, lower cost, and lower environmental impacts.
An in-house trial application of the technology resulted in approximately 8% reduction of the raw materials cost in a model case*.
*This evaluation was conducted in collaboration with the Okuno Laboratory, Graduate School of Medicine, Kyoto University.
☑︎ Outline of the technology
The patented technology consists primarily of two machine learning models.
One is a “prediction model” for product quality, and the model may be chosen arbitrarily.
For example, it can be a model to predict the characteristic values of the final or intermediate product, based on the chemical structure, physical property values, formulation recipe, and other raw material information as well as the manufacturing method, process parameters, and other manufacturing process information. In addition to the characteristic values of product quality, those of costs and environmental impacts are also contemplated.
The other model is the “optimization model” that finds the proposed points of raw materials and manufacturing process out of the accumulated data sets.
☑︎Optimization flow of the technology
For conditions search, the optimization model outputs proposed points of raw materials and products, based on the currently available datasets. Then, the prediction model predicts the characteristic values of the costs and others, based on the conditions of the proposed points. The information thus generated is added to the datasets and accumulated. After that, the same operation is repeated, based on the updated datasets.
By repeating this loop, the datasets are accumulated to identify the raw materials and the manufacturing process that optimize the multiple characteristic values of the product quality, cost, etc. all at once.
☑︎ Envisaged use cases
The envisaged use cases of the patented technology include:
Optimization of raw materials/manufacturing process in product design
Optimization of raw material costs across multiple kinds of products
Proposing raw materials/manufacturing process for development of derivative products
Prompt optimization of raw materials/manufacturing process in response to raw material cost fluctuations
☑︎ Patent details
Patent number: JP 7157402
Registration date: October 12, 2022
Patentee: ExaWizards Inc.
Title of the invention: Information processing method and program
☑︎ About ExaWizards’ open innovation
ExaWizards is focused on promoting open innovation in collaboration with external partners by actively building and leveraging our patent portfolio.
AI models, algorithms, software, UI, know-how, patents, and other assets generated from past projects are accumulated as our assets and used to create new projects with external partners. In particular, projects that utilize our proprietary patented technologies provide high added value unique to our company and are highly evaluated by our partners.
Contact ExaWizards for more information about Open Innovation(In Japanese)
URL: https://exawizards.com/intellectual-property
[Corporate Profile of ExaWizards]
Company name: ExaWizards Inc.
Location: 21F, Shiodome Sumitomo Bldg., 1-9-2, Higashi Shimbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo
Representative: Ko Ishiyama, Representative Director & President
Description of business: Industrial innovation and resolution of social issues through the development of AI-enabled services
URL: https://exawizards.com/
<Contact for public relations>
E-mail address of the Public Relations Division of ExaWizards Inc.: publicrelations@exwzd.com