Supporting Human-Machine Cooperative Design in Multi-Agent Systems

To utilize the flexible problem solving capability of human designers, we aim at extending our previous approach for cooperative problem solving among computational agents toward a human-machine cooperative design system within the framework of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). We extend our method to allow the interactive modification of evaluation measures in cooperative design through the communication among the agents by re-scaling relative weights of the measures. To prevent the ramification of the modification by human designers, we also propose a method for supporting consensus building between human and computational agents based on Analytic Hierarchy Process. The implementation of the proposed method has been conducted and its effectiveness is evaluated through the cooperative design of a micro satellite in MAS. Key-Words: Human-Machine Cooperative Design, Multi-Agent Systems, Analytic Hierarchy Process, Satellite Design, Cooperation Method