An agent-based framework to support collaborative product design.
详细信息
文摘
This thesis investigates the requirements of collaborative product design and proposes a new agent-based framework to support design collaboration by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the management and coordination of collaborative product design processes.;Collaborative design creates added-values in the product development process by bringing the benefits of teamwork and cooperation. However, its success is undermined by difficulties arising from the differences between heterogeneous system architectures and information structures. Agent technology is a promising approach to analyzing, designing, and implementing industrial distributed systems. The hypothesis of this research is that a collaborative product design framework implemented by taking an agent-based approach can assist human designers effectively and efficiently in collaborative design processes.;Based on the investigation of collaborative design processes, the requirements for a collaborative product design framework are identified. Then, a new agent-based framework is proposed and it relocates designers and supporting agents in a unified knowledge representation scheme.;In order to model the constantly changing design process and design rationales, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM) and a Collaborative Design Process Model (CDPM) are proposed to maintain the consistency of product data and assist designers in making good decisions. The CPDM is established by extending the traditional feature-based parametric Product Data Model (PDM) to include information related to the management and coordination of collaborative product design processes. The CDPM takes a constraint-oriented approach to modelling the collaborative design process because, in product design, most of the design requirements can be represented in computational design constraints.;Based on the proposed system architecture, CPDM and CDPM, a prototype system is implemented. The results of design experiments using the implemented prototype system demonstrate how the proposed framework improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the management and coordination of a collaborative product design process.;This research contributes to the development of new tools supporting collaborative product design using computational agents in an integrated framework. The implemented framework with product design examples demonstrated the advantages of using agent technology to achieve better design cooperation, coordination, response, desired modularity, and improved software reusability in the process of product design collaboration.