Integrating planning, execution, and learning

To achieve the goal of building an autonomous agent, the usually disjoint capabilities of planning, execution, and learning must be used together. An architecture, called MAX, within which cognitive capabilities can be purposefully and intelligently integrated is described. The architecture supports the codification of capabilities as explicit knowledge that can be reasoned about. In addition, specific problem solving, learning, and integration knowledge is developed

An Evolution of Collaborative Design Tools

This paper describes a series of three design tools intended to support various forms of conflict management in concurrent and collaborative engineering settings. The tools are Explorer, ParMan (Parameter Manager), and PCA (Project Coordination Assistant). Explorer is a single-user parametric design assistant that allows many alternative designs satisfying multidisciplinary constraints to be generated and compared graphically. ParMan is a multi-user parametric design agent that permits distributed engineers to input constraints and evaluate the impact on the combined design space. PCA is a multi-user tool allowing engineers to encode and share semi-structured, non-parametric information about a project. Each of these tools is described below, along with experiences and motivation for development of the subsequent tool

SHADE: Technology for Knowledge-Based Collaborative Engineering

Effective information sharing and decision coordination are vital to collaborative product development and integrated manufacturing. However, typical special-purpose CAE systems tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, and typical integrated CAE systems tend to limit flexibility and process innovation. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project strikes a balance between these undesirable extremes by supporting reconfigurable exchange of engineering knowledge among special-purpose CAE systems. SHADE's approach has three main components: a shared knowledge representation (language and domain-specific vocabulary), protocols supporting information exchange for change notification and subscription, and facilitation services for content-directed routing and intelligent matching of information consumers and producers. 1 Introduction At the heart of effective concurrent engineering is communication. In product development, something is always changing-perhaps a design requireme..