Agent-based System for Collaborative Stamping Part Design

This paper reports on a collaborative design environment to facilitate active die-maker involvement into metal stamping part design. Using the agent-based approach, a multi-agent based system is constructed to integrate die-maker´s activities into customer part design process within a collaborative and concurrent environment. The overall architecture incorporates three agent communities: part design agent, die-maker involvement agent, and coordination agent. Each agent community has a facilitator which provides an intermediary between a local collection of sub-agents and remote agents through two main services: routing outgoing messages to the appropriate destinations and translating incoming messages for consumption. A KQML/XML communication and data exchange method between agents is proposed. A case study is presented to illustrate how the die-maker is involved and cooperates with the part designer to make an optimal stamping part design