AN AGENT-BASED SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING DESIGN ENGINEERS IN THE EMBODIMENT DESIGN PHASE
Year: 2011
Editor: Culley, S.J.; Hicks, B.J.; McAloone, T.C.; Howard, T.J. & Dong, A.
Author: Kratzer, Martin; Rauscher, Michael; Binz, Hansgeorg; Goehner, Peter
Section: Design Methods and Tools Part 2
Page(s): 178-189
Abstract
Today, product development is dominated inter alia by a complex and interdisciplinary working environment. As a consequence, several problems come up: design engineers need a huge amount of knowledge to design high quality products, non-compliance with basic requirements and non-compliance of machine elements with different design guidelines like Design for X. One possibility to overcome these problems is the use of knowledge-based systems in engineering design. This paper follows a different approach: the use of an agent-based system in combination with a CAD System to support design engineers in the embodiment design phase. Because of its novelty, this approach has to be investigated and several problems have to be tackled. Firstly, it is not clear in which way the ABDS has to be built up. Secondly, there is no structured method for integrating engineering design knowledge into ABDSs. Due to these two problems, there is no generic procedure for developing these ABDSs. Answers regarding these problems will be given in this paper.
Keywords: ENGINEERING DESIGN KNOWLEDGE; DESIGN SUPPORT SYSTEMS; AGENT-BASED SYSTEM