A multiagent system for the support of concurrent engineering

The concurrent design of a product involves the cooperation of many functions such as manufacturing, logistics, marketing, and sales. It can be represented as a multiagent system with each agent representing a kind of expertise. Each agent has its own evaluation criteria and egoistic goals. Decision-making leads to problems typical for concurrent engineering, in which all related processes are simultaneously taken into consideration. In this paper, we discuss some characteristics of conflict, conflict type identification, as well as conflict resolution. A system architecture and an agent structure are proposed. We also propose a novel scheme named distributed dynamic conceptual tree to overcome the difficulty of understanding between agents during the problem solving process and reduce the amount of communications between agents. An demonstration example validating our work is presented.