A Multi-Agent Based Information Integration Platform for Computer Supported Collaborative Design

Collaborative virtual environment for product design occurs between people and often involves 3D objects. Fruitful cooperation is helped by natural and intuitive way of communication and interaction, for which responsiveness and consistency are leading factors. In order to guarantee consistency and improve responsiveness, a novel concurrency control scheme is first proposed. In our scheme, non-exclusive concurrent manipulations are merged so as to undo a small quantity of manipulations rather than all the operations triggered by users who are not granted, therefore, a majority of concurrent operations are collision-free and executed immediately to maximize responsiveness. Moreover, notification and visual indicator mechanism are used to avoid unnecessary concurrency collision. The implementation of collaborative virtual environment named VRCAD is then introduced in detail, including system architecture, concurrency control strategy and communication facilities. Experiment and practice show that our concurrency control scheme is effective and efficient for collaborative virtual environment involving 3D objects.

Product design tends to be more complex and needs the effective cooperation among multidisciplinary designers and engineers. An ideal product design environment, which is both collaborative and intelligent, will be much appreciated. Agent technology is an innovative and promising approach to implementing distributed systems and is becoming popular in various areas of computing in recent years. In this paper, the dynamic nature of collaborative design process and the representation of collaborative design knowledge are presented. In order to model constantly evolving design process and the rationales resulted from collaboration, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM), which extends traditional Product Data Model (PDM), and a constraint-based Collaborative Design Process Model (CDPM) are proposed. These are intended to facilitate the management and coordination of collaborative product design process and knowledge management. A design example is used to illustrate CDPM. While the system is being implemented, the architecture of our agent-based collaborative product design environment based on CPDM and CDPM is described.

A number of disciplines (mechanics, structures, thermal, and optics) are needed to design and build Space Camera. Separate design models are normally constructed by each discipline CAD/CAE tools. Design and analysis is conducted largely in parallel subject to requirements that have been levied on each discipline, and technical interaction between the different disciplines is limited and infrequent. As a result a unified view of the Space Camera design across discipline boundaries is not directly possible in the approach above, and generating one would require a large manual, and error-prone process. A collaborative environment that is built on abstract model and performance template allows engineering data and CAD/CAE results to be shared across above discipline boundaries within a common interface, so that it can help to attain speedy multivariate design and directly evaluate optical performance under environment loadings. A small interdisciplinary engineering team from Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity has recently conducted a Structural/Thermal/Optical (STOP) analysis of a space camera with this collaborative environment. STOP analysis evaluates the changes in image quality that arise from the structural deformations when the thermal environment of the camera changes throughout its orbit. STOP analyses were conducted for four different test conditions applied during final thermal vacuum (TVAC) testing of the payload on the ground. The STOP Simulation Process begins with importing an integrated CAD model of the camera geometry into the collaborative environment, within which 1. Independent thermal and structural meshes are generated. 2. The thermal mesh and relevant engineering data for material properties and thermal boundary conditions are then used to compute temperature distributions at nodal points in both the thermal and structures mesh through Thermal Desktop, a COTS thermal design and analysis code. 3. Thermally induced structural deformations of the camera are then evaluated in Nastran, an industry standard code for structural design and analysis. 4. Thermal and structural results are next imported into SigFit, another COTS tool that computes deformation and best fit rigid body displacements for the optical surfaces. 5. SigFit creates a modified optical prescription that is imported into CODE V for evaluation of optical performance impacts. The integrated STOP analysis was validated using TVAC test data. For the four different TVAC tests, the relative errors between simulation and test data of measuring points temperatures were almost around 5%, while in some test conditions, they were even much lower to 1%. As to image quality MTF, relative error between simulation and test was 8.3% in the worst condition, others were all below 5%. Through the validation, it has been approved that the collaborative design and simulation environment can achieved the integrated STOP analysis of Space Camera efficiently. And further, the collaborative environment allows an interdisciplinary analysis that formerly might take several months to perform to be completed in two or three weeks, which is very adaptive to scheme demonstration of projects in earlier stages.

Personal assistant agents for collaborative design environments

This paper reviews work on distributed collaborative virtual design environments and the emerging technology of metacomputing. The paper discusses the design of distributed collaborative design environments using metacomputing, for example Globus, to provide intensive data computing via an asynchronous collection of loosely synchronous components. The essential component, Globus, focuses on defining a toolkit of low-level services for security, communication, resource location, resource allocation, process management, and data access. Based on this approach, the requirements for concept, functionality and performance of the design environments are provided. The key functions in the distributed collaborative design environments such as analysis, visualisation, security and database management, particularly the 3D design storage and visualisation, are also discussed. Finally, further work on implementing Globus-based distributed collaborative design environments is highlighted.

In distributed collaborative design environments, product models and virtual studios should keep consistency to create sense of sharing the world and collaboration among physically distributed users. Model consistency is usually achieved by maintaining dynamic shared states. To make those events in physical locations virtually "seen" by the other participants, networks communications are indispensable. Because of limited network bandwidths and CPU resources in distributed and collaborative design environments, to decrease communication traffic is a critical issue. In this paper, we present a "near-sight" mode, which resorts to a method of using AOI, area of interest, to reduce efficiently communications to maintain dynamic shared states.

Refurbishment of building services engineering systems under a collaborative design environment

China Offshore Data Translation Net and Information Integration and Release Platform

Complex products are best developed in a collaborative design environment where engineering data and CAD/CAE results can be shared across engineering discipline boundaries within a common software interface. A new software tool that allows Electro-Optical (EO) sensors to be developed in this manner has been used to conduct an integrated Structural/Thermal/Optical (STOP) analysis of a critical lens subassembly in a flight payload. This paper provides a description of the software environment and a summary of the technical results that were produced with it.

Robot shaping: developing autonomous agents through learning

A mixed reality environment for collaborative product design and development

In the near future every person, independent of geographical location, will have some sort of network computing capability, either by means of conventional desktop computing or through mobile devices. This not only means that geographically distributed users will be able to easily communicate, but also collaborate i.e. share multimedia documents and applications. Web services have introduced a new paradigm for platform-independent computing. As a result, it is very attractive to use these modular services to design multimedia collaboration systems for the Internet. Today there are many individual services being developed using the Web services paradigm. However, these services are rarely collaborative or asynchronous in nature. This paper presents the design and architecture of a dynamic collaboration framework. The system supports the integration of collaboration-aware and unaware services. To demonstrate the feasibility of our novel approach, we have successfully integrated sample services into a Web based collaborative desktop environment for electronic design automation (EDA) teams.

Marketing and Distribution Integrated System is based on GIS systems, and a unified information model of power grid equipment, basic data and topology-based systems, the use of high-tech information technology, application management and distribution line losses quarter field of network construction planning, customer outage management and other integrated information platform. Energy management system implementation ultimate goal is to achieve through intelligent system integration of existing systems be saving energy consumption and improved. In automation technology and IT based on the establishment of energy management systems, based on objective data, metallurgical, chemical, thermal, power plants and other energy consuming enterprises, energy saving most fundamental way to implement. The foundation and core of this system is that the data distribution network GIS platform, integrated measurement automation, distribution network of production, distribution network planning, distribution network automation, distribution network engineering, marketing and other systems supporting the management and reliability of power supply and distribution network planning decisions Camp with information query formulated meter reading routes and other services.

The integration of practice and learning is a key to cultivation of organizational capability for creating or inheriting intellect. In this paper, firstly we address the critical research issues for collaborative space design to integrate practice and learning. Following the discussion, we have built an ontology which specifies the structure of the collaborative learning, described patterns of a collaborative space by reference to the learning theories and developed an intelligent function to support a collaborative space design on ontology-based KM environment, Kfarm, as a foundation for supporting collaborative space design.KeywordsOrganizational MemberAbstract DesignComputer Support Collaborative LearnPractical GoalCollaborative SpaceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

The cooperation of autonomous agents is synthesized in order to satisfy demands imposed on a group of agents or on MAS (multi agent systems). Petri nets (PNs), especially place/transition PNs (P/T PNs), are used for modelling the agents. The modular approach is utilized on that way. PN-based methods of discrete event systems (DES) control and supervising are utilized in order to synthesize the cooperation of the agents. The usefulness and applicability of the approach is demonstrated by examples and case studies.KeywordsAgentsbipartite graphscontrolcooperationdiscrete-event systemsPetri netssupervisorsynthesis