A Multi-Agent Framework for Collaborative Engineering Design and Optimization

Agent technology is playing an increasingly important role in developing intelligent, distributed and collaborative applications. The innate difficulties of interoperation between heterogeneous agent communities and rapid construction of multi-agent systems have motivated the emergence of FIPA specifications and the proliferation of multi-agent system platforms or toolkits that implement FIPA specifications. In this paper, a FIPA compliant multi-agent framework called AADE (Autonomous Agent Development Environment) is presented. This framework, originating from the engineering fields, can facilitate the rapid development of collaborative engineering applications (especially in engineering design and manufacturing fields) through the provision of reusable packages of agent-level components and programming tools. An agent oriented engineering project on the development of an e-engineering design and optimization environment is designed and developed based on the facilities provided by the AADE framework.