Design and implementation of a process-oriented intelligent
collaborative product design system
Yuliang Li
*
, Xinyu Shao, Peigen Li, Qiong Liu
School of Mechanical Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, PR China
Received 11 November 2002; accepted 11 April 2003
Abstract
With the competition between companies being fiercer and customers being more demanding, the efficiency of design
decision-making must be improved to shorten the product design cycle. Intelligent collaborative product design is needed in the
product design process. In this paper, based on the Analysis–Synthesis–Evaluation (ASE) design paradigm and the para-
meterization of product design, an agent that incorporates the working mechanism of expert systems is designed to assist a
designer in his work. In line with the modularization of the product design, a module-based multi-agent system is developed and
deployed according to the CORBA standards to facilitate the coordination among designers within the range of enterprises and
even virtual enterprises. In the light of preliminary tests on the Internet, the agent and the agent system show some advantages to
increase the efficiency of the design coordination and decision-making in the product design process.
# 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Intelligent; Agent; Design process; Collaborative design
1. Introduction
As the competition between companies becomes
fiercer and customers become more demanding, enter-
prises must develop their products in a shorter lead-
time and respond to the market demands faster. Many
systems have been built to support the collaborative
design decision-making process. These systems can be
generally grouped into the following categories:
collaborative product information management for
engineers to timely obtain the necessary product
data and knowledge [1–6];
network based collaborative product design sys-
tems which can be further divided into Web-inde-
pendent [7–14] and Web-dependent [15–21]
systems;
process-centred collaborative product design and
workflow management [22–26];
conflict detection, management and resolution for
collaborative design [25,27–29];
flexibility and security focused collaborative design
system [30];
interoperability approaches in heterogeneous colla-
borative design systems [8,31,32].
The above software systems can assist designers in
one way or another in collaboration since most of
them are developed for the needs of collaborative
product design. However, a software tool that can
provide efficient coordination and decision-making
Computers in Industry 53 (2004) 205–229
*
Corresponding author. Tel.: þ86-27-8755-6063;
fax: þ86-27-8754-3074.
E-mail address: lyl9416@163.net (Y. Li).
0166-3615/$ – see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/S0166-3615(03)00146-5