Material Name Matching for Regulatory Compliance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Manufacturers face difficulties in ensuring compliance with environmental regulations due to inconsistencies in chemical substance naming conventions across different systems, leading to inefficient determination of substances' usage and potential production stoppages, fines, and market exclusion.
Innovation Solution
A computer-implemented method for matching material names from various sources with safety data sheet names, involving preprocessing, comparison, and probability calculation to identify and display matching safety data sheet material names, utilizing processing circuitry for extracting, parsing, and tokenization, and applying pattern matching and machine learning techniques.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If manual querying of multiple systems is used to check for regulated substances, then compliance assessment can be performed, but the process is time-consuming and inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The patent merges multiple separate systems (production specifications, safety data sheets, inventory systems) into a single integrated compliance assessment system. This integration allows simultaneous access to all relevant data sources through one interface, eliminating the need for manual querying of multiple disconnected systems and significantly reducing the time required for compliance checking while maintaining comprehensive assessment accuracy.
Solution Approach 2:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-processing and standardizing material names from various sources before compliance queries are executed. Material names are normalized, matched across systems, and organized in advance, so that when a compliance check is needed, the system can quickly retrieve pre-processed information without performing time-consuming data normalization during the actual compliance assessment.
2Adaptability or versatility
If different naming conventions are used across systems, then each system can maintain its own standards, but matching material names becomes difficult and error-prone
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an intermediary layer that acts as a translator between different naming conventions used across various systems. This intermediary component contains mapping relationships between different material naming standards and converts them to a unified format for comparison and matching, allowing systems to maintain their own independent naming conventions while achieving accurate material identification and matching through the translation layer.
Solution Approach 2:
The system applies parameter changes by transforming material name attributes (such as chemical formulas, common names, trade names) into standardized parameters that can be consistently compared across different systems. This transformation process converts diverse naming conventions into a common parameter space, enabling accurate matching while preserving the original system independence and naming flexibility.
3Loss of information
If comprehensive data from multiple systems is collected, then complete substance usage information can be obtained, but data integration and processing complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the data integration process into distinct modular components: data extraction modules for each source system, data cleaning modules for specific data types, matching modules for material name comparison, and aggregation modules for consolidating results. This segmentation allows comprehensive data collection from multiple systems while managing complexity through modular architecture, where each module handles a specific aspect of data processing independently and can be developed, maintained, and scaled separately.
Data Source
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AI summary
A computer-implemented method for matching material names from one or more material sources with safety data sheet material names from one or more safety data sheets. The method includes: extracting the material names from the one or more material sources; preprocessing the material names and removing extraneous data from one or more of the material names; selecting one of the material names; comparing the selected material name with the safety data sheet material names; identifying the safety data sheet material names that match the material name; and transmitting an output to a user device to display the material name and the matching safety data sheet material names.