An Agent-based Architecture for Concurrent Engineering

Abstract

This paper describes a reference architecture for a concurrent engineering environment. The architecture embeds applications in wrappers to treat the applications as individual reasoning agents. Embedded applications have included planning, vision, simulation, and robotic control modules. These agents negotiate from various perspectives to arrive at globally acceptable solutions. The agents transmit information and negotiate using a canonical vocabulary based upon an international standard for data exchange. Because our implementation of the architecture explicitly considers real-world issues, such as heterogeneous systems, distributed processing, faults, meeting real-time deadlines, and communication delays, the implementation of architecture facilitates rapid transferral from laboratory experiments to field systems.