Research on Resource Discovery in MAS for Collaborative Design

Collaborative design is a new technique for mechanical design. Multi-agent system (MAS) can cooperate with others to solve problems by network of software agents. Collaborative design system includes design agent, manage agent, conflict resolution agent and so on. A method based on MAS is present to solve the resource finding among agents. Firstly, the relationship between multi-agent systems and peer to peer systems is introduced. Then a distributed searching method is applied to find knowledge. Agent searches for the resource by neighbor, which will go until the agents find the right resource. The random path and team searching style are provided to solve the problem, which is compared by the simulation. The hybrid method including random path and team searching is suit for knowledge discovery. Knowledge discovery method works successfully in collaborative design based on MAS.