Enhancing manufacturing product development through learning agent system over internet

Simultaneous design, which mainly consists of product design and manufactur ing process design, is the key part of design for manufacturability (DFM) a pplied in integrated manufacturing. In conventional sequence system, tasks in process planning only perform the preparation for production technologie s in which there is just a message flowing from product design to process p lanning. This proposal presents an intelligent design system environment th rough agents based collaborative support. This proposed system exchanges process-related features, capabilities and c onstraints among design and manufacturing agents. The system, which can enh ance manufacturing product development, emphases on the consideration of el ements related to process planning and manufacturing at the same time of pr oduct design to materialize design for manufacturability, which is utilizin g agents communicating over the internet. The agents communicate using know ledge query and manipulation language(KQML). (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.