Research on the knowledge management architecture of LCED based ontologies and multi-agent system

Abstract

Life cycle engineering design (LCED) is the key and comprehensive technology to realize manufacturing industries’ sustainable development. Its main objective is to support design teams to create products considering the entire product life-cycle from conception through manufacturing and assembly to disassembly, recycling, disposal, and lifecycle assessment. So LCED should be collaboratively implemented among the different departments. This paper puts forward knowledge management architecture of LCED based ontologies and multi-agent system. The definition of the domain-specific ontology, the multi-agent architecture are described. Based on the two concepts, this paper discusses the detailed construction of CAD agents, LCED evaluation agents and knowledge maintenance agents and the system implementation. It can fulfill the concurrent collaborative developing of a product under distributed environments and also meet the requirement of knowledge sharing, interoperability, reusing among the whole lifecycle of product.