Supporting Collaborative Product Design in an Agent Based Environment

One of the problems in building collaborative and intelligent design systems is the difficulty in integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) with design knowledge to generate results to the satisfaction of designers who often have high demands on aesthetics as well as scientific aspects of a supporting tool. In this paper, we present an open and flexible design computing architecture, which has the characteristics of both Client/Server (C/S) model and distributed model. Two collaboration processes (synchronous and asynchronous) are facilitated in this proposed architecture. For the design of agents, we propose a new model to deal with various types of knowledge sources, which have to be incorporated in the collaboration process. Versioning and locking mechanisms are implemented to support synchronous and asynchronous collaborations. Based on this architecture, a collaborative design environment has been implemented using the standard of Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)