Design and implementation of a process-oriented intelligent collaborative product design system

Abstract

With the competition between companies being fiercer and customers being more demanding, the efficiency of design decision-making must be improved to shorten the product design cycle. Intelligent collaborative product design is needed in the product design process. In this paper, based on the Analysis–Synthesis–Evaluation (ASE) design paradigm and the parameterization of product design, an agent that incorporates the working mechanism of expert systems is designed to assist a designer in his work. In line with the modularization of the product design, a module-based multi-agent system is developed and deployed according to the CORBA standards to facilitate the coordination among designers within the range of enterprises and even virtual enterprises. In the light of preliminary tests on the Internet, the agent and the agent system show some advantages to increase the efficiency of the design coordination and decision-making in the product design process.