DETC2006-99149 AN AGENT-BASED APPROACH TO COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT DESIGN

ABSTRACT The growth of computer science and technology has brought new opportunities for multidisciplinary designers and engineers to collaborate with each other in a concurrent and coordinated manner. The development of computational agents with unified data structures and software protocols can contribute to the establishment of a new way of working in collaborative design, which is increasingly becoming an international practice. In this paper, we first propose a computational model of collaborative product design management aiming to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the cooperation and coordination among participating disciplines. Then, we present a new framework of collaborative design which adopts an agent-based approach and relocates designers, managers, systems, and supporting agents in a unified knowledge representation scheme for product design. An agent-based system is now being implemented and the design of a set of dinning table and chairs is chosen to demonstrate how the system can help designers in the management and coordination of the collaborative product design process. INTORDUCTION Increasing product complexity, explosive global competition, and rapidly changing customer's demands are forcing product manufacturers to improve the efficiency of design decision-making and shrink design cycle times. Advances in the computer science and technology have opened new opportunities for multidisciplinary designers and engineers to collaborative with each other more efficiently and effectively. Collaborative design can create added value in the design and production process by bringing the benefit of team work and cooperation in a concurrent and coordinated manner. Also, it help reduce the loss of efficiency resulted from potential conflicts and misunderstandings among team members. However, the difficulties arising from the requirements for design coordination mixed with differences among heterogeneous system architectures and information structures tend to undermine the effectiveness and the success of collaborative design among multidisciplinary designers. Recently, agent technology has been recognized by more and more researchers as a promising approach to analyzing, designing, and implementing industrial distributed systems. An intelligent agent consists of self-contained knowledge-based systems capable of perceiving, reasoning, adapting, learning, cooperating, and delegating in a dynamic environment to tackle specialist problems. The way in which intelligent software agents residing in a multi-agent system interact and cooperate with one another to achieve a common goal is similar to the way that human designers collaborate with each other to carry out a product design project. Thus, we believe that a collaborative product design environment implemented by taking an agentbased approach will be capable of assisting human designers or design teams effectively and efficiently in collaborative product design. In this paper, based on the analysis of the characteristics of a collaborative design process, we first propose a computational model of collaborative product design management to improve

Linking design and manufacturing domains via web-based and enterprise integration technologies

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Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes

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Companies that collaborate within the product development processes need to implement an effective management of their collaborative activities. Despite the implementation of a PLM system, the collaborative activities are not efficient as it might be expected. This paper presents an analysis of the problems related to the collaborative work using a PLM system. From this analysis, we propose an approach for improving collaborative processes within a PLM system, based on monitoring indicators. This approach leads to identify and therefore to mitigate the brakes of the collaborative work