DIDE: A Multi-Agent Environment for Engineering Design

摘要

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 paral-lel and independently with the different engineer-ing tools which are located on the different sites for often a long time. In order to ensure the co-ordination of the design activities of the different groups or the cooperation among the different en-gineering tools, it is necessary to develop an effi-cient distributed intelligent 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 introduc-ing the general architecture and the communica-tion protocol, issues about the agent architecture and the inter-agent communication are discussed. A prototype of such an environment with seven independent agents located in the different work-stations and microcomputers is presented and an example of a small mechanical design is used for demonstrating such an environment.