Agent assisted concurrent process engineering system for design support

It has been noted that the integration of the design process can be achieved based on a concurrent engineering approach. One of the primary issues for the application of concurrent process engineering is to count with an environment to communicate engineers who perform different tasks at different sites. This goal may be achieved by sharing design information through an agent-assisted environment. A multi-agent architecture has been developed to assist in the integration of process design for the prototype system CPEDSYS. It is based on cooperating intelligent entities which provide the necessary information and data, and assist in the decision making process using domain-specific knowledge both, distributed among the entities, and centralized but accessible to all of them. Using this architectural framework, an Agent Assisted Concurrent Design System (AA-CPED) has been developed for feature-assisted process design to read and inform about the features and status of the design progress. This paper discusses various aspects of the approach, describes the design environment being developed and concludes indicating future research directions.