An agent-based decision network for concurrent engineering design

Engineering design is a complex process. Even in designing a simple product , many decisions must be made by a designer. The problem gets more complex when multiple designers work as a team to design single artifact. In this p aper, we take a decision-based approach to model design process and introdu ce an agent-based decision network (ADN) to support concurrent decision-mak ing and collaboration in design. ADN focuses on making designers consider o ther team members' decisions when making their own and attempts to achieve coherent design decisions among designers by explicitly representing and en hancing individual design decision-making and negotiation processes. ADN is composed of a decision-based design process model (DDPM), an objective-bas ed negotiation model (OBNM), and a number of intelligent agents, each assoc iated with a human designer. The DDPM was developed to capture individual d esigners' design processes. OBNM was developed to facilitate objective-base d negotiation and to track both dependencies generated and decisions made a t each design stage for downstream negotiation support. In ADN, each design er is associated with an agent and both the DDPM and OBNM are captured and facilitated by agents and are not explicitly visible to designers. Agents g enerate and utilize the DDPM and OBNM information to support their designer s. This paper describes the ADN framework in detail, points out its advanta ges, and presents an application example to demonstrate the effectiveness o f the ADN framework.