製品設計・生産のためのコラボレーション最適化

Abstract

In current product design and manufacturing environments that depend upon optimization techniques, numerous product criteria such as cost, performances, qualities, reliability, environmental impact, and product life cycle factors, must be all be considered in order to obtain the most preferable design solution. During such optimization processes, a key point that enables present design solution limitations to be broken through is to make use of wider feasible design regions, which include superior solutions. Collaborative optimization is the most promising strategy for achieving this broadening of design regions. In this paper, first, the merits of collaborative optimization are explained, and next, the difficulties of collaborative optimization are described. Then, collaborative optimization for product design and manufacturing is discussed from the following three collaboration viewpoints : (1) Collaboration in which decision-makers of different divisions having different requirements and knowledge cooperatively evolve solutions concerning product design and manufacturing, (2) Collaboration in which different groups and/or enterprises having competitive relationships consider collaborative projects, and (3) Collaboration in which experts are integrated into the optimization process, using mobile-agents operating in networked computing environments. Finally, current perspectives and the future outlook concerning these kinds of collaborative optimization are discussed.