An agent- and service-based collaborative design architecture under a dynamic integration environment

The shortening of product realization times and the increase of product complication require multidisciplinary experts to cooperate dynamically and closely in the whole product development lifecycle, behavior that has been previously unfamiliar. To further improve the design cooperation efficiency under this environment, this paper presents a novel cooperative design architecture using revolutionary Internet, agent, and semantic Web technologies. Based on the concept of service provision, intelligent Web-agent groups act as the function backbone to organize the service-based running of the system. Multidisciplinary product development units can be dynamically formed and configured in a knowledge-integration perspective. The layer-based architecture encapsulates distributed knowledge at a higher abstract level and coordinates lifecycle activities from different domains. Semantic-rich service expression and intelligent service accessing through agent mediation make the system more flexible. Within this dynamic cooperative environment, all of the participants involved and their distributed knowledge can be integrated as a whole to achieve more efficient and more intelligent design cooperation.