Designing Integrated Engineering Environments: Blackboard-based Integration of Design and Analysis Tools

In the automotive industry, the knowledge, information, and tools required for design, analysis, manufacturing, and testing of company products are distributed throughout the organization. This fragmentation of expertise and information creates impediments to cost-eeective design engineering. This article describes: 1) an approach to building integrated engineering environments based on blackboard technology as the integrating infrastructure; and 2) the RRM Engineering Environment, developed at Ford Research Laboratory. The RRM Engineering Environment is a large-scale prototype application comprising thirteen agents, some of which are legacy application programs, written in various languages, and distributed over heterogeneous machines and platforms. Use of integrated environments, such as the RRM environment , is expected to result in increased productivity, fewer delays and errors, and better communication among interacting participants in the design-to-manufacture process.