An Experimental Multi-Agent Environment for Engineering Design

Abstract

Real world engineering design projects require the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using sophisticated and powerful engineering tools. The individuals or the individual groups of the multidisciplinary design teams work in parallel and independently often for quite a long time with different tools located on various sites. In order to ensure the coordination of design activities in the different groups or the cooperation among the different tools, it is necessary to develop an efficient design environment. This paper discusses a distributed architecture for integrating such engineering tools in an open design environment, organized as a population of asynchronous cognitive agents. Before introducing the general architecture and the communication protocol, issues about an agent architecture and inter-agent communications are discussed. A prototype of such an environment with seven independent agents located in several workstations and microcomputers is then presented and demonstrated on an example of a small mechanical design.

Computer supported collaborative design: Retrospective and perspective

“…Software agents were used to integrate different engineering tools. Examples of early applications of software agents in collaborative design include PACT [21], DIDE [22], and SiFAs [23].…”

“…SiFAs [23] was intended to address the issues of patterns of interaction, communication, and conflict resolution using simple single-function agents. DIDE [22] was developed to study system openness, legacy systems integration, and distributed collaboration. ICM [45] In agent-based collaborative design systems, software agents are mostly used for supporting cooperation among designers, enhancing interoperability between traditional computational tools, or allowing better simulations (particularly distributed simulations).…”

“…Most systems use federated system architectures, e.g., a facilitator approach in PACT [21] and a mediator approach in ABCDE [48]. A few systems use the autonomous agent approach [22].…”

An Agent-Based Approach for Manufacturing Enterprise Integration and Supply Chain Management

“…The research work presented in this paper is based on our earlier research projects: MetaMorph I , ABCDE (Agent-Based Concurrent Design Environment) , and DIDE (Distributed Intelligent Design Environment) (Shen and Barthes 1995). In this section, we give a brief overview of these research projects.…”

“…Its objective is to integrate the manufacturing enterprise's activities such as design, planning, scheduling, simulation, execution, and product distribution, with those of its suppliers, customers and partners into an open, distributed intelligent environment. For this purpose, we propose a hybrid agent-based architecture combining and extending the architectures used in our previous projects MetaMorph I , ABCDE and DIDE (Shen and Barthes 1995).…”