DIDE: A Multi-Agent Environment for Engineering Design

Real world engineering design projects require the cooperation of multidisciplinary design teams using sophisticated an powerful engineering tools. The individuals or the individual groups of the multidisciplinary design teams work in parallel and independently withthe different engineering tools which are located onthe different sites for often a long time. In order to ensure the coordination of the design activities of the different groups or the cooperation among the different engineering tools, it is necessary to develop anefficient distributed intelligent design environment. This paper discusses a distributed axchitecturc for integrating such engineering tools in an open design environment organized asa population of asynchronous cognitive agents. Before introducing the general architecture andthe communicat.ion protocol, issues about he agent axchitecture azLd the inter-agent communication axe discussed. A prototype ofsuch an environment with seven independent agents located inthe different workstations and microcomputers is presented and an example ofa sin’,all mechanical design is used for demonstrating such an environment.