Mobile Agents for Collaborative Design and Analysis

As the tools for design and manufacturing increase in both numbers and sophistication, the ability to collaborate using these tools eeectively is becoming increasingly diicult. In order to use high delity analysis and manufacturing tools at the design stage, the designers need to communicate with domain experts and their tools, which may be geographically dispersed over heterogeneous computing platforms. The ability to eeectively communicate between diverse tools is thus strewn with technical diiculties and ontological issues, which impede the collaborative process. This paper presents a Multi Agent Design Architecture (MADA) model which provides a framework for the design and analysis tools to eeectively communicate by enlisting the use of mobile software agents.