Collaborative Design Supporting System for Manufacturing Systems

Global competition forces industrial companies to reduce cost and time to develop new manufacturing systems. To achieve this goal, collaborative design projects will be more popular among different companies or divisions. The design knowledge, however, is usually not well organized or archived in a digital form. This paper proposes a design agent system to navigate engineers in the design process of manufacturing systems. The design agents digitally model design processes itself, parameters for each design activity, engineering tools and rational logic rules. The design agents communicate with each other to help manufacturing system designers on distributed sites in the collaborative design processes online. In this paper, the structure, roles, and functions of the design agents are discussed. The proposed design agent system is implemented using JAVA programming language.