A multi-agent based framework for multi-disciplinary conceptual design synthesis
Year: 2013
Editor: Udo Lindemann, Srinivasan V, Yong Se Kim, Sang Won Lee, John Clarkson, Gaetano Cascini
Author: Chen, Yong; Liu, Zelin; Huang, Jian; Zhang, Zhinan
Series: ICED
Institution: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, People's Republic of
Page(s): 239-248
ISBN: 978-1-904670-49-0
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
It is encouraged that designers should explore in wide multi-disciplinary solution spaces for finding novel and promising principle solutions to desired functions during conceptual design. However, due to lack of sufficient multi-disciplinary knowledge, it is often difficult for human designers to explore in such a wide multi-disciplinary solution space. Therefore, it is desirable to have an automated conceptual design system, which can automatically achieve multi-disciplinary conceptual design synthesis for human designers. Based on the multi-disciplinary conceptual synthesis approach developed before, this paper proposes a multi-agent based framework for achieving the conceptual design synthesis of multi-disciplinary systems. The roles of different kinds of agents and the collaborative mechanisms among them are elaborated. A conceptual design case is employed to illustrate how the multi-agent-based design synthesis framework works, which also shows that the proposed multi-agent based framework can achieve better efficiency than our previous approach.
Keywords: Conceptual design, computational design synthesis, multi-agent systems, functional modelling; principle solution