Scalable BDI-based Multi-Agent System for Digital Design Reviews

The increasing complexity in product development and the lack of knowledge exchange, for example, between development and manufacturing lead to unnecessary iteration loops and high costs. To overcome this situation, an option is the execution of a design review using multi-agent systems to provide designers with a digital assistance system for checking their CAD (computer-aided design) models regarding manufacturability using a milling process. This paper explores how to increase the scalability and robustness of multi-agent systems (MAS) for manufacturability assessment by using runtime-generated BDI (belief-desire-intention) agents and graph-based feature recognition. The applicability and validation of the presented approach is carried out by evaluating different milled part designs

Application of Decentralized and Self-Regulating Knowledge Bases for Assembly Design Automation

During product development, changes to parts that are already built into assemblies usually lead to the need to check the function and consistency of the assembly. This procedure is very time-consuming and has to be performed again for each change. In this paper, an approach is presented in which the individual parts are represented as agents that adapt themselves to new conditions. The agents are combined in a multi-agent system (MAS) and interact via communication over messages. For this purpose, a methodical procedure for the development of the MAS and the implementation in a CAD development environment is presented. The validation of the MAS is carried out on the application example of a gearbox

Development of a knowledge-based and collaborative engineering design agent

In order to avoid errors in engineering design that affect the later product life cycle, especially the manufacturing process, an analysis or evaluation has to be performed at the earliest possible stage. As this evaluation is very knowledge-intensive and often this knowledge is not directly available to the engineer, this paper presents an approach for a knowledge-based and collaborative engineering design agent. The technology based on multi-agent systems enables problem-solving support by an autonomous knowledge-based system which has its own beliefs, goals, and intentions. The presented approach is embedded in a CAD development environment and validated on an application example from engineering design