An Internet-based integrated product design environment. Part I: a hybrid agent and network architecture

Abstract

During the past two decades, concurrent or collaborative engineering (CE) has presented new possibilities for successful product development. In addition, the advances in computer networks and information technology have brought engineering design context into a new era. As a promising approach to accommodate the radical pace of changes in the context of engineering design, agent technologies have been attracting public attention and are being used in an increasingly wide variety of applications. However, little attention has been paid to multi-agent system (MAS) frameworks for CE environments that enable systematic and timely design integrations in both hierarchical and heterarchical design topology. This is the first of a two-part paper proposing a MAS framework for integrated product design in a computer network-oriented CE environment. Part I first proposes a hybrid agent network architecture to develop lightweight, dynamic and large-scale distributed systems, and then proposes a hybrid agent architecture based on our finite state automata (FSA) formalism that can exhibit both hybrid behaviours and hybrid interactions. Finally, some ideas for building an integrated product design environment are presented using the proposed agent and network architecture. Part II discusses the applications of the proposed MAS framework to concurrent engineering design.