An Agent-Based System Supporting Collaborative Product Design

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. However, the difficulties arising from the differences between heterogeneous system architectures and information structures undermine the effectiveness and the success of collaborative design. This paper presents 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 capable of assisting designers in the management and coordination of collaborative design process via the cooperation of a network of agents including mainly management agents, communication agents, and design agents etc is described.

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