Abstract
The engineering product development process in a collaborative design context can be viewed as: a network of linked decisions with interdependencies; problem decomposition of product design project and aggregation of sub-problems by multi-disciplinary or multi-talented teamwork; resource sharing and coordination process such as design objectives sharing, information exchanging with other team members, design conflicts detecting and resolving, and generating new ideas and design improvements. In this research, we propose a hybrid multi-agent architecture (ANetCoDE) for supporting such a distributed collaborative engineering design context. The agent architecture and network architecture of ANetCoDE are overviewed, autonomy-based network formation of agents with deliberative/reactive characteristics and local/remote distribution for the design agents are proposed, and multi-layered network architecture for facilitating the agent interactions is presented. Finally, a planar robot design with multidisciplinary design capabilities is demonstrated on the proposed ANetCoDE platform.
