Preliminary development of agent technologies for a design integration framework

Abstract

† --Fake footnotes to get them to show up on this page -this is white Effective design of modern systems requires the systematic application of design resources throughout a product's life-cycle. Information obtained from the use of these resources is used for the decision-making processes of Concurrent Engineering. Integrated computing environments facilitate the acquisition, organization and use of required information. State-of-the-art computing technologies provide the basis for an Intelligent Multi-disciplinary Aircraft Generation Environment (IMAGE) described in this paper. IMAGE builds upon existing agent technologies by adding a new component called a model. With the addition of a model, the agent can provide accountable resource utilization in the presence of increasing design fidelity. Agent fundamentals are illustrated with a zeroth-order agent example. A CATIA™based agent is described to demonstrates that agent technologies can be scaled to include large and complex proprietary resources. Likewise, multi-proprietary resource systems are demonstrated with an aircraft component modeling system integrating CATIA and ORACLE™ and with a High Speed Civil Transport visualization system linking CATIA, FLOPS, and ASTROS. These examples illustrate the important role of the agent technologies used to implement IMAGE, and together they demonstrate that IMAGE can provide an integrated computing environment for the design of open engineering systems.

Multidisciplinary Environments: A History of Engineering Framework Development

“…For example, NASA Langley researchers describe a functioning parallel processing framework called FIDO that includes an executive control process, centralized data manager, graphical user interface and data monitoring capabilities 27 . At the same 5th MA&O conference, the important idea that a component is an analysis code plus a model that are wrapped together is proposed by Hale and Craig 28 . These authors explain that wrapped computer codes can contain additional information such as units and limitations and communicate with each other via predefined protocols.…”

On the development of a computing infrastructure that facilitates IPPD from a decision-based perspective (Integrated Product and Process Development)

“…A generic scheme has been proposed that allows for Agents to be developed from existing available assets or new Agents to be developed that incorporate the functionality of new design environments and computing characteristics. References [10,19,20] summarize generic Agent implementation schemes. Examples of Agents that incorporate proprietary resources are also highlighted in these references.…”

A High-Speed, Performance-Optimization Algorithm Based on a Gravitational Approach

“…Agent systems are well suited to large-scale distributed and dynamic systems. 4 They offer good flexibility and scalability because more agents can be added as the problem size increases. Agent systems operate asynchronously and in parallel and can offer increased speed and efficiency compared to centralized systems.…”