Composing and sharing dynamic models in an agent-based concurrent engineering environment

Sharing design information in a distributed engineering team is a challenging problem. Ideally, the information exchange should be flexible enough to accommodate different levels of abstraction required for different engineering design and analysis tasks. We propose a solution in which specialists, and the programs they use, are modeled as agents who share a common communication language and ontology. The ontology includes both a symbolic representation of the equations describing system behavior and the conditions (such as parameter ranges) over which the model is valid. We use the a hybrid modeling paradigm to generate consistent models at multiple levels of abstraction and demonstrate the approach with design analysis tasks for a stepper motor actuated positioning system.