Cooperative product design process modeling

Modeling the cooperative product design process is a key challenge in building up cooperative and intelligent product design information systems and environments. Since the cooperative design process is characterized by distributed workflow and complicated interaction, it is constraint oriented involving the recognition, formulation, and satisfaction of constraints. The authors first introduce a constraint network to model complex relationships in the cooperative design process that are both the causes and results of interaction. Based on the constraint network, an event-driven constraint-triggered decision-pushed automated design process model is built. The authors then use a Petri net to model interaction behaviors including communication, negotiation, coordination and cooperation. Finally, implementation of the MAS prototype based on the cooperative design process model is described and an application example is provided in brief.