| Design is a complex problem solving and knowledge refinement process. In recent years there has been an increasing deployment of computer-aided tools to support the design process in areas such as CAD (Computer-Aided Design), CAE (Computer-Aided Engineering) and CAM (Computer-Aided Manufacturing). Making good use of CAS/CAD/CAM/CAE technologies in this stage will accelerate the design process while increasing its accuracy.Conceptual design can be regarded as the most essential part of the design process because any plan has its foundations laid in this stage. When conceptual design is finished, the most important aspects in the design process is settled, and the successive process is to ensure the conceptual design product to satisfy the need.However, in most cases the technique of CAD still has some defects to support conceptual design in that:(1) The traditional CAD technique aims to produce complex, accurate and complete 3D modles, and is short of supporting by design methodologists for providing effective solutions to the creative problem.(2) The traditional CAD systems aims to specific domains and are usable only in the detailed design stage and provide limited or no support for conceptual design, which depart the conceptual design from the whole design process. When designers work, they first bring out conceptual design final using their experience by hand, then they use computer to design the single parts and at last they assemble and optimize the design to put out the final product. The system is basically a conceptual drawing tool, not an aided design tool. So CAD system cannot support the design activities and only play a role of an aided drawing tool.(3) The fact that designing process was far natural to the designer, or to the designer's way of thinking. The result of conceptual design and the sketch from the designer cannot be used directly.(4) A lack of considering collaborative design and cooperative work process. Considering supporting creative design, we should provide a rational and effectivemechanism to utilize all kinds of knowledge, methods and design experience and the system may bring out some information during the design process to support the creative activities of the designer. Design is an open-ended process and creativity is a character of man, so it is not feasible for computer to design automatically. With the development of the blending collaborative pattern and object-oriented problem solving pattern, which is originated from basic resoning form based on knowledge expression and the general problem-solving pattern, the distributed artificial intelligence has become the emphasis of research.Distributed Artificial Intelligence mainly focuses on formation, harmonization and related techniques in semi-automatic system, which is developing and cooperated in artificial intelligence computing. Recently, multi-agent system is the research aspect of the distributed artificial intelligence and provides a novel approach to address complex problems, wheredecisions should be based on processing of information from various sources of diverse nature. Design is a process of acquiring knowledge, during which we can simultaneously manage distributed information and knowledge. Moving to an agent-based system has many benefits, which will be evident throughout the paper; to mention only some of them we can:(l)Accorded with real-life design, as the environment adopts the mode of computer aided designer work, while designers have the control authority to find the design tactic and design agents have absolute knowledge and decision method to support designers.(2)Promote design reuse in our environment, because we introduce artificial agent, the fundamental component in the system, to avoid designing each product start from scratch.(3)Consider distributing character of the design domain. Design is a distributing process, both in resource and person. The multi-agent system applies a better environment to connect the distributing resource and information.(4)Improve collaborative wor... |
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