Development of an agent-based collaborative product design environment

An ideal product design environment which is both collaborative and intelligent will be much appreciated since product design tends to be more and more complicated and requires the effective cooperation among multidisciplinary designers and engineers. In this paper, the requirements of a collaborative product design environment are examined firstly. Then, an agent-based collaborative product design environment facilitating the management and coordination of collaborative design process via the cooperation of a network of intelligent agents is proposed. The system, architecture of our proposed system is presented and a formation of design agent is described in detail. A design example is used to illustrate how collaborative design is supported.