Agents for multidisciplinary design in virtual worlds

Agent models provide a generalised approach to the design of systems that autonomously monitor and affect an environment. Societies of agents which reason and communicate about an environment can achieve complex emergent behaviour to facilitate and augment human activities. This paper introduces artificial agent technologies as a means by which the behavioural complexity of virtual worlds can be extended to provide the functionality needed to support collaboration in multi-disciplinary design teams. Three key roles are identified which artificial agents can play in order to provide this functionality: support for multiple views of designed objects, support for the expression of relationships between designed objects and compatibility with existing design tools. The implementation of a society of agents fulfilling these roles within a virtual world based, multidisciplinary design tool called DesignWorld is described. The increased behavioural complexity and functionality of DesignWorld’s underlying virtual world is demonstrated using the results of multidisciplinary design experiments with DesignWorld.