Towards a system for design planning in a concurrent engineering environment

In concurrent engineering (CE), an attempt is made to perform design activities simultaneously rather than in series as in the case of traditional design processes. The theoretical benefits of this concurrent approach are a reduction of the duration of the design project, cost savings, and better quality of the final design. Practical implementations of CE in industry indicate that successfully managing the CE design process to achieve these goals will require advanced techniques and tools. A framework for a multiagent distributed system that supports analysis, planning and scheduling in order to provide coordination and control of the design process in a CE design environment is proposed. The ultimate goal of the envisaged framework is to provide engineering management with a design process planning software application which utilizes multiagent distributed systems (MADS) integrated to other knowledge sources (agents) by means of a blackboard-based architecture