Coordination mechanisms for cooperative design

Abstract

Engineering design problems, especially in the domain of civil engineering, are often solved by a group of individual participants with different expertise, loosely organized as a design team. In order to maintain the coherence of a design team, design participants' activities must be coordinated. In this paper, the authors present a set of coordination mechanisms, developed from artificial intelligence techniques, that serve as a basis for computational systems to support both distributed and concurrent design teams. Cooperative design problem-solving tasks are defined, based on the concepts of commitments and conventions. Coordination mechanisms for these tasks are developed by implementing different artificial intelligence techniques, such as contract nets and partial global planning. A prototype system in the domain of structural engineering is introduced, which serves as a test-bed for the coordination mechanisms.