Intelligent user assistance in collaborative design environments

This work reports on our recent work on intelligent user assistance for collaborative design environments. Critical to the success of the agent framework design has been a cognitive user model, which is composed of a user interest model and behavior model. The intelligent assistance architecture integrates these models with other environment models as well as with inference, knowledge-update and collaboration components. All these models and components collectively enable the intelligent assistant agent to effectively achieve the user's goals in a collaborative design environment. The proposed user model is implemented in a coordinated, intelligent, rational agent (CIR-Agent) model on a FIPA-compliant platform. This paper also presents a case study on a multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) software environment and our efforts towards a general collaborative personal assistant agent framework.