An Internet-based integrated product design environment. Part II: its applications to concurrent engineering design

Concurrent or collaborative engineering (CE) has inspired research in the area of design decomposition, which facilitates the concurrency of product lifecycle functions from the earlier stage of the product development process and reduces the complexity of a design problem. The decomposition-based design, on the other hand, necessitates various integration efforts for recombining the decomposed design problems. This is the second of a two-part paper proposing a multi-agent system (MAS) framework for integrated product design in a computer network-oriented CE environment. Part II discusses the applications of the proposed MAS framework to concurrent engineering design. The proposed framework realises the systematic and timely design integrations between multi-functional/cross-functional team members in a dynamic design environment, by enabling model integration, solution integration and tool integration. The proposed design agents make the problem-specific engineering models or heterogeneous design tools interoperable and network-accessible, and also provide the interaction spaces for communicating, integrating or coordinating the individual design solutions. Throughout the paper, the proposed system is illustrated with a successful implementation of a continuously variable transmission (CVT) design problem over the Internet .