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In airplane research and development, tooling design is desired to be undertaken with airplane product design concurrently together with the considerations of downstream processes such as manufacturing and assembling. However, so far, collaborative design for aircraft tooling, especially in large-sized one, is difficult. To solve this, a self-adaptive collaborative design method of aircraft tooling based on a natural neuron-endocrine-immunity system, multi-agent and product data management (PDM) technologies has been developed and is presented in this article. Firstly, with the similar working principle of the neuron-endocrine-immunity system model that is able to manage cells and tissues of a human body in a self-adaptive means, a tooling collaborative design model has been developed to enhance the responsiveness and adaptability for changes during aircraft design. Secondly, a collaborative design framework has been proposed by applying the multi-agent and PDM technologies to implement this model. The multi-agent technology focuses on managing the frequent changes, and the PDM has been used to manage the mass aircraft product design and tooling. This framework incorporates the PDM Client/Server architecture and adopts a federated structure for effective collaboration in terms of unified data sharing, convenient tool wrapping, decentralized control, coordination, etc. Finally, a multi-agent-based prototype system, developed, and testified in an aircraft manufacturing enterprise, is demonstrated for aircraft tooling collaborative design. Case studies show that optimized and re-configurable aircraft tooling design can be achieved with the help of the developed collaboration framework.

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