8. The system of claim 1 , wherein the at least one knowledge base is a patent collection that is remotely accessed.
1. A system for obtaining solution suggestions for problems, the system comprising: at least one processor and at least one storage medium including an electronic model of a system or process, wherein the electronic model includes components of the system or process and relationships between the components; a problem analysis tool that analyzes the components and the relationships between the components of the electronic model to identify a problem to be solved, generates a problem statement representing the problem, and generates a machine representation of a problem statement; a query formatter that reformulates the machine representation into a natural language query or Boolean query and automatically submits the query to at least one knowledge base; and the at least one knowledge base comprising at least one database comprising problem solutions and returning a set of solution suggestions responsive to the query.