Design for Manufacturability via Agent Interaction

1 We describe an approach for making the capability of manufacturing processes manifest to designers starting with the earliest stages of geometry specification. The approach involves a dialogue among design and manufacturing agents over the Internet. The dialogue focuses on the specification and exchange of process capability models for establishing “design rules on-demand” to ensure manufacturability. The models include both declarative knowledge and, for those aspects of the process that are difficult to represent declaratively, platform-independent procedural code which is automatically loaded onto the designers’ machines. The approach is being implemented using agents, written in the Java 2 language, which exchange feature-based capability models. The approach is being tested initially on machining and shape-deposition processes.