Abstract
As design and manufacturing enterprises become increasingly globalized, human, physical and computational resources supporting corporate operations are increasingly dispersed geographically. Such situations require the development of product design support systems that exploit information network technology to enable the sharing of design resources and facilitate design processes, with widely separated individuals and groups acting in collaboration. This paper proposes a collaboration system that integrates product design information and the specific design goals held by each participating designer across the distributed network. The design information for such cooperative product design projects is managed using network agents that have two main features. First is an ability to clarify the wide range of design information required by separated designers, based on consistency management techniques. Second is the evaluation of design alternatives, based on optimization techniques, that assists the creation of successful product models. By using these agents, a team of geographically dispersed designers can collaboratively construct an optimal product design model and effectively find global optimum design solutions.
