Constructing an intelligent collaborative design environment with distributed agents

Increasingly complex design tasks and globally distributed designers require a design environment to be intelligent and collaboration-supported. However, as today's CAD tools are becoming more powerful in helping designers draw geometric graphs, they have little intelligence and weak capability in supporting design collaboration. In such a context, distributed agent technology poses to be a promising way to well address these problems. In this paper, we present a distributed agent environment based on the CORBA paradigm. We construct an agent community to help designers work collaboratively across computer networks. To make it autonomous, reactive and proactive, we construct an agent with a component-based framework. The case study section of this paper demonstrates that the software system implemented according to the proposed architecture can provide designers with both intelligent assistance and collaboration support.