Fuzzy agents communities for product integrated configuration

This paper proposes fuzzy agents to assist collaborative design for product integrated configuration. More effective design decisions can be made by fuzzy agents when fuzzy design information is considered in a fuzzy interaction based process and fuzzy evolving systems. Modelling of a fuzzy agent-based system, called F_APIC (Fuzzy Agents for Product Integrated Configuration), is presented. In F_APIC, there are four fuzzy communities of fuzzy agents involved in specification, function, physical solution and domain constraint. During design process, cooperation between fuzzy agents grouped in fuzzy communities permit to emerge the consensual physical solutions to optimally configure a product. A case study for a “Chair configuration” illustrates the proposed approach.