Multiple Evolutionary Agents for Decision Support

In a complex engineering design, multiple engineering design teams are required to work cooperatively in order to design a single product. However multiple disciplinary teams in different departments and companies often use different systems with different modelling methods and techniques. While the parallelism of this approach can reduce the design life cycle, the complexity of the optimisation problem can lead to difficulties. Agent technology can alleviate some of the difficulties of concurrent design. In this paper, we present an architecture in which agent technology is used to model interactions between design systems, and thereby enable design agents from various design disciplines to explore the design problem and solution space. We also introduce a multiple-evolutionary approach with an automated negotiation mechanism to enable agents to exchange design solutions and to reach an agreed optimised solution for a global design problem.

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