A virtual design environment using evolutionary agents

The Virtual Design Environment is an information architecture to support design-manufacturing-supplier planning decisions in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. The approach utilizes evolutionary intelligent agents as program entities which generate and execute queries among distributed computing applications and databases. The evolutionary agents support a global evolutionary optimization process in which successive populations systematically select planning alternatives which reduce cost and increase throughput. A prototype of the virtual design environment has been implemented using CORBA as a principal distributed systems programming tool. The prototype has been used to examine design-manufacturing-supplier decisions for a real commercial electronic circuit board product (Pitney Bowes Inc.) and to explore plans in controlled experiments with alternative manufacturing facilities.