Agent-based approach for collaborative distributed mechatronic design

Coordination between different parts of a design is a difficult task, especially if the design is made by several designers geographically distributed and using different modeling tools. Traditionally, this is done through physical meetings between representatives of the various design groups. However, it faces difficulties when it comes to large and complex problems of design. In this study, a new approach for efficient optimization based on multi-agent paradigm is proposed to facilitate the collaborative distributed design through coordination, information exchange and negotiation. The proposed method is applied to the pre-design case of an electric vehicle to demonstrate its validity and effectiveness.