Agent-based product design and planning for distributed concurrent engineering

This paper describes a multi-agent approach to the integration of product design, manufacturability analysis, process planning, and assembly in a distributed manner. The objective is to develop a distributed concurrent engineering system to allow geographically dispersed entities to work cooperatively towards overall system goals. The proposed model considers constraints and requirements from the different product development cycles in the early development phases and fully supports the concept of design-for-manufacturability. This methodology uses conflict resolution (CR) techniques and design-improvement suggestions to refine the initial product design. The model comprises six service agents, a console agent and a facilitator agent. Each service agent is used to model different product development phases, and the console agent acts as an interacting interface between designers and the system, while the facilitator is responsible for the decomposition and dispatch of tasks, and solving conflicts of poor designs. The implementation methodology provides an effective way of enabling heterogeneous legacy software tools in communicating and coordinating with others over the Web through the use of Java-based agent wrapping techniques.