A JADE-based Autonomous Workflow Management System for Collaborative IC Design

This paper proposes a multi-agent system to manage the distributed collaborative design environment. The JADE-based autonomous workflow management system (JAWMS) uses a workflow enactment mechanism and an agent integration mechanism. The workflow enactment mechanism is the system kernel and follows the specifications of the workflow reference model. The system kernel supports five agents to manage the workflow and the integration mechanism supports an agent to interact with other platforms and to coordinate and monitor the workflow. JAWMS facilitates integrated circuit design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment.