An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Engineering Design

Abstract

Engineering design is a complex process. Even in designing a simple product, many decisions must be made by a designer. The problem gets more complex when multiple designers work as a team to design single artifact. In this paper, we take a decision- based approach to model design process and introduce an agent-based decision network (ADN) to support concurrent decision-making and collaboration in design. ADN focuses on making designers consider other team members' decisions when making their own and at tempts to achieve coherent design decisions among designers by explicitly representing and enhancing individual design decision-mak ing and negotiation processes. ADN is composed of a decision-based design process model (DDPM), an objective-based negotiation model (OBNM), and a number of intelligent agents, each associated with a human designer. The DDPM was developed to capture indi vidual designers' design processes. OBNM was developed to facilitate objective-based negotiation and to track both dependencies gen erated and decisions made at each design stage for downstream negotiation support. In ADN, each designer is associated with an agent and both the DDPM and OBNM are captured and facilitated by agents and are not explicitly visible to designers. Agents generate and uti lize the DDPM and OBNM information to support their designers. This paper describes the ADN framework in detail, points out its advan tages, and presents an application example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ADN framework.