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

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Implementation challenges of annotated 3D models in collaborative design environments

Recent studies in the area of collaborative design have proposed the use of 3D annotations as a tool to make design information explicitly available within the 3D model, so that different stakeholders can share information throughout the product lifecycle. Annotation practices defined by the latest digital definition standards have formalized the presentation of information and facilitated the implementation of annotation tools in CAD systems. In this paper, we review the latest studies in annotation methods and technologies and explore their expected benefits in the context of collaborative design. Next, we analyze the implementation challenges of different annotation approaches, focusing specifically on design intent annotations. An analysis of the literature suggests that the use of annotations has a positive effect on collaborative design communication as long as proper implementation practices, tools, and user interaction mechanisms are in placeCamba, J.; Contero, M.; Salvador Herranz, GM. (2014). Implementation challenges of annotated 3D models in collaborative design environments. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 8683:222-229. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-10831-5_332222298683Katzenbach, J.R., Smith, D.K.: The Discipline of Teams. Harvard Business Review 71(2), 111–120 (2005)Campion, M.A., Medsker, G.J., Higgs, A.C.: Relations between Work Group Characteristics and Effectiveness: Implications for Designing Effective Work Groups. Personnel Psychology 46, 823–850 (1993)Chudoba, K.M., Wynn, E., Lu, M., Watson-Manheim, M.B.: How Virtual Are We? Measuring Virtuality and Understanding its Impact in a Global Organization. Information Systems Journal 15, 279–306 (2005)Lahti, H., Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, P., Hakkarainen, K.: Collaboration Patterns in Computer Supported Collaborative Designing. Design Studies 25, 351–371 (2004)Chang, K.H., Silva, J., Bryant, I.: Concurrent Design and Manufacturing for Mechanical Systems. Concurrent Engineering 7, 290–308 (1999)Jackson, C., Buxton, M.: The Design Reuse Benchmark Report: Seizing the Opportunity to Shorten Product Development. Aberdeen Group, Boston (2007)Lang, S., Dickinson, J., Buchal, R.O.: Cognitive Factors in Distributed Design. Computers in Industry 48, 89–98 (2002)Alemanni, M., Destefanis, F., Vezzetti, E.: Model-Based Definition Design in the Product Lifecycle Management Scenario. International Journal of Advanced Manufacturing Technology 52(1-4), 1–14 (2011)ASME: ASME Y14.41-2012 Digital Product Definition Data Practices. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York (2012)ISO: ISO 16792:2006 Technical Product Documentation – Digital Product Definition Data Practices. Organisation Internationale de Normalisation, Genève, Suisse (2006)Bracewell, R.H., Wallace, K.M.: A Tool for Capturing Design Rationale. In:14th International Conference on Engineering Design, Design Society, Stockholm, Sweden (2003)Boujut, J.F., Dugdale, J.: Design of a 3D Annotation Tool for Supporting Evaluation Activities in Engineering Design. Cooperative Systems Design, COOP 6, 1–8 (2006)Alducin-Quintero, G., Rojo, A., Plata, F., Hernández, A., Contero, M.: 3D Model Annotation as a Tool for Improving Design Intent Communication: A Case Study on its Impact in the Engineering Change Process. In: ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Chicago, Illinois (2012)Sandberg, S., Näsström, M.: A Proposed Method to Preserve Knowledge and Information by Use of Knowledge Enabled Engineering. In: ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Las Vegas, Nevada (2007)Dorribo-Camba, J., Alducin-Quintero, G., Perona, P., Contero, M.: Enhancing Model Reuse through 3D Annotations: A Theoretical Proposal for an Annotation-Centered Design Intent and Design Rationale Communication. In: ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition, San Diego, California (2013)Ding, L., Ball, A., Patel, M., Matthews, J., Mullineux, G.: Strategies for the Collaborative Use of CAD Product Models. In: 17th International Conference on Engineering Design, vol. 8, pp. 123–134 (2009)Davies, D., McMahon, C.A.: Multiple Viewpoint Design Modelling through Semantic Markup. In: ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Philadelphia, PA, vol. 3, pp. 561–571 (2006)Pena-Mora, F., Sriram, D., Logcher, R.: SHARED-DRIMS: SHARED Design Recommendation-Intent Management System. Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, 213–221 (1993)Iyer, N., Jayanti, S., Lou, K., Kalyanaraman, Y., Ramani, K.: Shape-based Searching for Product Lifecycle Applications. Computer-Aided Design 37(13), 1435–1446 (2005)Li, C., McMahon, C., Newnes, L.: Annotation in Product Lifecycle Management: A Review of Approaches. In: ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, vol. 2, pp. 797–806 (2009)Ding, L., Liu, S.: Markup in Engineering Design: A Discourse. Future Internet 2, 74–95 (2010)Patel, M., Ball, A., Ding, L.: Curation and Preservation of CAD Engineering Models in Product Lifecycle Management. In: Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia Dedicated to Digital Heritage, University of Bath, pp. 59–66 (2008)Ding, L., Davies, D., McMahon, C.A.: The Integration of Lightweight Representation and Annotation for Collaborative Design Representation. Research in Engineering Design 20(3), 185–200 (2009)Patel, M., Ball, A., Ding, L.: Strategies for the Curation of CAD Engineering Models. International Journal of Digital Curation 4(1), 84–97 (2009)Ganeshan, R., Garrett, J., Finger, S.: A Framework for Representing Design Intent. Design Studies 15(1), 59–84 (1994)Myers, K., Zumel, N., Garcia, P.: Acquiring Design Rationale Automatically. Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing 14(2), 115–135 (2000)Kunz, W., Rittel, H.: Issues as Elements of Information Systems. Working paper 131. Center for Planning and Development Research, Berkeley (1970)Shum, S.J.B., Selvin, A.M., Sierhuis, M., Conklin, J., Haley, C.B., Nuseibeh, B.: Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from Gibis and Qoc. Rationale Management in Software Engineering, 111–132 (2006)Sung, R., Ritchie, J.M., Rea, H.J., Corney, J.: Automated Design Knowledge Capture and Representation in Single-User CAD Environments. J. of Eng. Design 22(7), 487–503 (2011)Chandrasegaran, S.K., Ramani, K., Sriram, R.D., Horváth, I., Bernard, A., Harik, R.F., Gao, W.: The Evolution, Challenges, and Future of Knowledge Representation in Product Design Systems. Computer-Aided Design 45(2), 204–228 (2013)Ellis, G., Dix, A.: A Taxonomy of Clutter Reduction for Information Visualisation. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 13(6), 1216–1223 (2007)Cipriano, G., Gleicher, M.: Text Scaffolds for Effective Surface Labeling. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 14(6), 1675–1682 (2008)Stein, T., Décoret, X.: Dynamic Label Placement for Improved Interactive Exploration. In: 6th International Symposium on Non-Photorealistic Animation and Rendering, pp. 15–21 (2008)Götzelmann, T., Hartmann, K., Strothotte, T.: Agent-Based Annotation of Interactive 3D Visualizations. In: Butz, A., Fisher, B., Krüger, A., Olivier, P. (eds.) SG 2006. LNCS, vol. 4073, pp. 24–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)Szykman, S., Sriram, R., Regli, W.: The Role of Knowledge in Next-Generation Product Development Systems. J. of Computing and Inf. Science in Engineering 1(1), 3–11 (2001)Aubry, S., Thouvenin, I., Lenne, D., Olive, J.: A Knowledge Model to Read 3D Annotations on a Virtual Mock-up for Collaborative Design. In: 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, pp. 669–674 (2007)Jung, T., Gross, M.D., Do, E.Y.L.: Sketching Annotations in a 3D Web Environment. In: CHI 2002, Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 618–619 (2002)Bilasco, I.M., Gensel, J., Villanova-Oliver, M., Martin, H.: An MPEG-7 Framework Enhancing the Reuse of 3D Models. In: 11th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, Columbia, Maryland (2006)Pittarello, F., De Faveri, A.: Semantic Description of 3D Environments: A Proposal Based on Web Standards. In: 11th International Conference on 3D Web Technology, Columbia, Maryland (2006)Song, H., Guimbretière, F., Hu, C., Lipson, H.: ModelCraft: Capturing Freehand Annotations and Edits on Physical 3D Models. In: 19th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, pp. 13–22 (2006

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

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

A Generic Conceptual Model for Risk Analysis in a Multi-agent Based Collaborative Design Environment

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityThis paper presents a generic conceptual model of risk evaluation in order to manage the risk through related constraints and variables under a multi-agent collaborative design environment. Initially, a hierarchy constraint network is developed to mapping constraints and variables. Then, an effective approximation technique named Risk Assessment Matrix is adopted to evaluate risk level and rank priority after probability quantification and consequence validation. Additionally, an Intelligent Data based Reasoning Methodology is expanded to deal with risk mitigation by combining inductive learning methods and reasoning consistency algorithms with feasible solution strategies. Finally, two empirical studies were conducted to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the conceptual model.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Compan

Using situation theory to model information flow in design

Information flow is intensive during a design process, where delivering timely and appropriate information is required. Sonnenwald [2] identified 13 communication roles that emerged during four multidisciplinary design situations in the USA and Europe. She statedthat participants from different disciplines, organisations and cultures come to the design situation with pre-existing patterns of working activities, and specialised work languages. Different methods to represent information flow activities are used, varying in different companies, different disciplines, and different teams, which may cause misunderstandings particularly among design teams composed of different organisations. In this sense, it is important to present information flow in a rigorous way. Eastman and Shirley [3] developed amodel of design information flow. The model dealt with design information management, reflecting entities, constraints, design states, design document accessed modes, transactions, and version identifiers. But, the development of their model was not based upon a theoretical foundation. In this paper, we develop an alternative model to present information flow indesign based on a foundation of situation theory. The model may serve to analysis design information system and provide a basis for investigating the situatedness of designinformation flow. To be able to represent information flow we should firstly study its phenomena. Based on Sim's formalism of design activities, the theory of Speech Acts, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW, and other works studying information flow, an example model for information flow in design is developed. A discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of this representation method is carried out

Agent-Based Product Configuration: towards Generalized Consensus Seeking

This paper will present an evolution of a fuzzy agent based platform which performed products configuration. As a first step, we used the notion of consensus to establish robust results at the end of the configuration process. We implemented the concept of generalized consensus which implied the consideration of consensuses from the beginning, in this way robust data are treated during the entire process and the final result enables the designer to distinguish the robust components and flexible ones in a set of configurations.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures, 5 table

Decision-focussed resource modelling for design decision support

Resource management including resource allocation, levelling, configuration and monitoring has been recognised as critical to design decision making. It has received increasing research interests in recent years. Different definitions, models and systems have been developed and published in literature. One common issue with existing research is that the resource modelling has focussed on the information view of resources. A few acknowledged the importance of resource capability to design management, but none has addressed the evaluation analysis of resource fitness to effectively support design decisions. This paper proposes a decision-focused resource model framework that addresses the combination of resource evaluation with resource information from multiple perspectives. A resource management system constructed on the resource model framework can provide functions for design engineers to efficiently search and retrieve the best fit resources (based on the evaluation results) to meet decision requirements. Thus, the system has the potential to provide improved decision making performance compared with existing resource management systems