An agent-based system approach to fixture design

The development of an integrated computer-aided fixture design (CAFD) environment is heavily influenced by system architecture. Many of the architectures that have been employed in developing CAFD tools have followed a traditional or a concurrent engineering design process model, driven by the traditional notions of systematic fixture design. This paper takes a new approach by exploring the fundamental differences between various distributed design architectures, with the goal of matching the requirements for an extendable CAFD environment capitalising on the strengths of various system architecture templates to support the requisites of fixture design information support. Ultimately, an architecture is proposed and illustrated through a case study.

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