Design and Implementation of a New Generation Multi-Agent Task Environment Framework

Abstract

The Multi-Disciplinary Design Optimisation (MDO) process of products can be supported by automation of analysis and optimisation steps. The Design and Engineering Engine (DEE) is a useful concept to structure this automation. Within the DEE, a product is parametrically defined using Knowledge Based Engineering (KBE) techniques. The analysis of a particular product instantiation of this product model is performed by discipline analysis tools and a search engine provides a strategy to drive the design toward a feasible design, satisfy functional and performance requirements and constraints. To power the automatic analysis in this MDO setting an Agent Based Framework (ABF) has been developed. From the first release agent implementation several positive and negative aspect were found and addressed. It appeared that the framework requirements from literature often have a holistic approach, striving for integration of the MDO problem on the desktop of the engineer, rather than make use of distributed design capabilities in teams of engineers. In this perspective four levels of scoping are identified; organisational scoping level, framework or integration level, tool or engineering service level and data scoping level. These four scoping levels are a good frame of reference to link the identified actors, the four main established functions of a framework and the recent contributions in engineering framework development. Moreover the four levels of scoping helped to show not only the existence of product and process knowledge but also pointed out that there is a need to glue these independent knowledge areas together by using problem knowledge. Whit this problem knowledge, in form of a problem definition language, it should be possible to dictate the behaviour of the MDO framework. Conclusively, the second release agent software is described and various industrial use cases and accompanying network architectures are described for which the framework software will be made compatible with. Finally a status update to the implementation is provided.