An agent-based collaborative design system to facilitate active die-maker involvement in stamping part design

This paper reports on a collaborative design environment to facilitate active die-maker involvement in metal stamping product development. First, the role of die-maker in the metal stamping development process chain is analyzed comprehensively. The author takes the view that the die-maker should be involved in new product development processes as early as possible to enable concurrent engineering practice in metal stamping development. Then, using the agent-based approach, a multi-agent-based system is constructed to integrate die-maker's activities into customer product development process within a distributed, collaborative and concurrent environment. The overall architecture incorporates three agent communities: part design agent, die-maker involvement agent, and coordination agent. The content of each agent is described in detail. Each agent community has a facilitator which provides an intermediary between a local collection of sub-agents and remote agents through two main services: routing outgoing messages to the appropriate destinations and translating incoming messages for consumption. Finally, the system implementation is provided. A KQML/XML communication and data exchange method between agents is proposed. A case study is presented to illustrate how the die-maker is involved and cooperates with the part designer to make an optimal part design. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.