An intelligent agent-based collaborative workflow for inter-enterprise PCB product design

Currently, there is tremendous pressure to design and develop products in a short period of time to reduce time-to-market and project's life cycle. Researchers often propose workflow management system as a mechanism to facilitate teamwork in a collaborative product development environment. In this paper, we develop an agent-based collaborative workflow platform (ACWP), in which a group of intelligent agents work autonomously and collaboratively to perform workflow tasks and access data from a distributed environment. By the aid of intelligent agents, our system can execute customized workflow tasks for inter-enterprise users based on their individual requests, and conquer the complexity of product design in distributed, heterogeneous platform. The application of multi-agent systems ACWP for collaborative workflow management is investigated through an inter-enterprise PCB product design. ACWP facilitates PCB product design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment and moves up the whole performance of design process.