Abstract
Characterised by geographical, temporal, functional and/or semantic distribution, today’s enterprise models engage multiple design teams with heterogeneous skills cooperating together in order to achieve global optima in design. The success of this distributed design organization depends on critical factors such as the efficient management of the design related information circulated in the distributed environment and the support for the necessary cooperation process among participants dispersed across the enterprise. This paper proposes a multi-agent design information management system to support the synthesis and presentation of information to distributed teams for the purposes of enhancing design, learning, creativity, communication and productivity. Autonomous software agents and information ontologies enable the proposed system facilitating interoperation among distributed resources as well as knowledge sharing, reuse and integration.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Arias, E., Eden, H., Fischer, G., Gorman, A., Scharff, E.: Transcending the Individual Human Mind - Creating Shared Understanding through Collaborative Design. ACM transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7(1), 84–113 (2000)
Cross, N.: Design as a Discipline. In: Durling, D., Friedman, K. (eds.) Doctoral Education in Design: Foundations for the Future. Staffordshire University Press, Stoke-on-Trent (2000)
Nwana, H.S.: Software Agents: An Overview. Knowledge Engineering Review 11, 1–40 (1996)
Jennings, N.R.: On agent-based software engineering. Artificial Intelligence (2000)
Edmonds, E.A., Candy, L., Jones, R., Soufi, B.: Support for Collaborative Design: Agents and Emergence. Communications of the ACM 37 (1994)
Iheagwara, C., Blyth, A.: Evaluation of the performance of ID systems in a switched and distributed environment the RealSecure case study. Computer Networks (2002)
Pena-Mora, F., Hussein, K., Vadhavkar, S., Benjamin, K.: CAIRO: a Concurrent Engineering Meeting Environment for Virtual Design Teams. Artificial Intelligence in Engineering 14, 202–219 (2000)
Weiss, G.: Multi-Agent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, London (1999)
Bertola, P., Teixeira, J.C.: Design as a knowledge agent. Design Studies 24, 181–194 (2003)
Liu, H., Tang, M., Frazer, J.H.: Supporting evolution in a multi-agent cooperative design environment. Advances in Engineering Software 33, 319–328 (2002)
MacGregor, S.P.: New Perspectives for Distributed Design Support. The Journal of Design Research 2 (2002)
Huang, J.: Knowledge sharing and innovation in distributed design: implications of internet-based media on design collaboration. International Journal of Design Computing: Special Issue on Design Computing on the Net, DCNet 1999 (1999)
Fischer, G.: Knowledge Management: Problems, Promises, Realities and Challenges. IEEE Intelligent Systems (2002)
Viano, G.: Adaptive User Interface for Process Control based on Multi-Agent approach. In: AVI 2000, Palermo, Italy (2000)
Cutkosky, M.R., Englemore, R.S., Fikes, R.E., Genesereth, M.R., Gruber, T.R., Mark, W.S., Tenenbaum, J.M., Weber, J.C.: PACT: An Experiment in Integrating Concurrent Engineering Systems. In: Huhns, M.N., Singh, M.P. (eds.) Readings in Agents. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco (1997)
Nakakoji, K., Yamamoto, Y., Suzuki, T., Takada, S., Gross, M.: From Critiquing to Representational Talkback: Computer Support for Revealing Features in Design. Knowledge-Based Systems Journal 11, 457–468 (1998)
Thoben, K.-D., Weber, F., Wunram, M.: Barriers in Knowledge Management and Pragmatic Approaches. Studies in Informatics and Control 11 (2002)
Anumba, C.J., Ren, Z., Thorpe, A., Ugwu, O.O., Newnham, L.: Negotiation within a multi-agent system for the collaborative design of light industrial buildings. Advances in Engineering Software 34, 389–401 (2003)
Wang, L., Shen, W., Xie, H., Neelamkavil, J., Pardasani, A.: Collaborative conceptual design - state of the art and future trends. Computer Aided Design 34, 981–996 (2002)
Zhao, G., Deng, J., Shen, W.: CLOVER: an agent-based approach to systems interoperability in cooperative design systems. Computers in Industry 45, 261–276 (2001)
Chao, K.-M., Norman, P., Anane, R., James, A.: An agent-based approach to engineering design. Computers in Industry 48, 17–27 (2002)
Guarino, N.: Formal Ontology and Information Systems. In: Formal Ontology in Information Systems. FOIS 1998, June 6-8, 1998. IOS Press, Trento (1998)
Studer, R., Benjamins, V.R., Fensel, D.: Knowledge Engineering: Principles and Methods. Data and Knowledge Engineering 25, 161–197 (1998)
Gruber, T.R.: A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specification. Knowledge Aquisition 5, 199–220 (1993)
Wooldridge, M., Ciancarini, P.: Agent-Oriented Software Engineering: The State of the Art. In: Ciancarini, P., Wooldridge, M. (eds.) Agent-Oriented Software Engineering. Springer, Heidelberg (2001)
Oliveira, E., Fischer, K., Stepankova, O.: Multi-agent systems: which research for which applications. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 27, 91–106 (1999)
Bradshow, J.M.: An Introduction to Software Agents. In: Bradshow, J.M. (ed.) Software Agents. MIT Press, Cambridge (1997)
Franklin, S., Graesser, A.: Is it an Agent, or just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents. In: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages. Springer, Berlin (1996)
Borst, P., Akkermans, H., Top, J.: Engineering Ontologies. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 46, 365–406 (1997)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Chira, C., Chira, O., Roche, T. (2005). Multi-agent Support for Distributed Engineering Design. In: Ali, M., Esposito, F. (eds) Innovations in Applied Artificial Intelligence. IEA/AIE 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3533. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11504894_23
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11504894_23
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26551-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31893-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)