Abstract
The transition from a consumption-oriented society to a reuse-based society is needed for the effective use of resources and environmental protection. However, it is difficult for a user to make appropriate decisions for maintenance of his/her parts because of the wide range of choices of action and the huge amount of information required. To support the user's decision and to promote the reuse of parts, we have developed a part agent system that manages information about individual parts throughout their life cycle. A part agent is a network agent that contains the information of its corresponding part and follows the movement of the part via the network throughout its life cycle. This paper describes a new mechanism of a part agent that proposes appropriate maintenance actions for the corresponding part by estimating its expected value, cost, and environmental load based on the predicted information about its life cycle.
