Design of a Multi Agent Task Environment Framework to Support Multidisciplinary Design and Optimisation

The Multi-Disciplinary Design and Optimisation process of products can be supported by automation of analysis and optimisation steps. A Design and Engineering Engine (DEE) is a useful concept to structure this automation. Within the DEE, a product is parametrically defined using Knowledge Based Engineering techniques. The analysis of a particular product instantiation of this product model is performed by discipline analysis tools and a search engine provides a strategy to drive the design toward a feasible design, i.e. compliant with requirement, and desired product behaviour, i.e. that is desired by a (human) designer or design team. To power the automatic analysis in this MDO setting an agent based framework has been developed and a first release is implemented in a real-life DEE called TailorMate. A review of the use of the framework in this DEE has been performed and several positive and negative aspects are addressed. To facilitate the development of the second release agent based framework an analysis of the first release requirements and requirements found in literature has been performed. It is found that the requirements from literature often have a holistic approach towards frameworks, striving for integration of the MDO problem on the desktop of the engineer, rather than make use of distributed design capabilities in teams of engineers. From this literature analysis a new set of requirements is proposed for future framework development, independent of implementation specifics. Conclusively several ideas for the next release of the agent based framework are described, based on the review of the first release and the release of the updated set of requirements.