An agent based architecture for collaborative design and analysis

Recent Communication and Internet technologies are making impact in every corner of life. Manufacturing is also no exception. The key idea of Concurrent Engineering (CE) is exchange of knowledge among various personnel from different enterprise of different expertise in designing a component. Even though the manufacturing community has already started realising CE in many ways, conventional CE tools lack main ingredient of CE, i.e., on-line sharing of manufacturing knowledge and data. This paper proposes an agent based architecture for sharing manufacturing data among applications, experts and enterprise