Dynamics patent analysis of development in perspective trends of power electronics

The present article describes the advance forecasting of scientific trends based on quantitative and dynamic analysis of US patent time series, which are grouped by IPC groups and key words and phrases. Forecast of the economy and its scientific and technical branches development allows to concentrate the financial, material and human resources in order to solve problems in the most urgent and promising areas, to shorten terms, increase efficiency and reduce cost of R&D. It is suggested to use the advance forecasting methods in order to predict the promising areas development of specific research topics in the scientific and engineering fields. The perspective and accuracy of these methods are explained by the property of scientific and technical information to be in advance compared with the implementation of scientific and engineering achievements. This property is realized by the use of special information processing. The patent method of forecasting based on quantitative and dynamic analysis and generated time series of US patents from 1976 to 2013 is suggested as a result of performed analysis. The given method features are shown for the case of analysis of development trends of AC power input into DC power output converters (IPC subgroup H02M7/00) based on using a generated specialized patent database of 6969 US patents. The goal of the developed technique for patent analysis based on the US Patent Office resources is to perform the following steps. 1) Selection of a group, a subgroup of the International Patent Classification (IPC) corresponding to the problem in question. 2) Formation of a specialized patent database. 3) Composition of a list for the chosen IPC main subgroup with the patent numbers in each subgroup. 4) Carrying out the static analysis, with elimination of the uninformative subgroups having a small number of patents. 5) Simplifying the structure of IPC subgroup in question. 6) Analysis of patent time series under successive transition from the upper levels of IPC to the lower ones. 7) Selection of the promising research fields with a rising trend. Thus, the static patent analysis allows to find out perspectives for development where the problem is planned to be realized, while the dynamic patent analysis allows to identify the development trend for a specific technical solution. The given analysis of the particular case confirms the obvious truth concerning the prospects of semiconductor static voltage converters. The given approach can be recommended for revelation of promising directions in power electronics. Patent analysis of time series of IPC upper levels allows to prove a promising way of new types of equipment development, while the technical solution choice at the lower level is a developer's area of responsibility based on his / her experience, available scientific background and resources. The given analysis confirmed the well known trend in the power electronics development based on semiconductor technologies, thus having proved the perspective use of the patent method of forecasting the various engineering branches.

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