Software Architecture for Cold Roll-forming Design and Simulation

As a result of analysis of the technical difficulties of cold roll-forming and the requirements of a collaborative design system for cold roll-forming, the physical four-tier structure of the cold roll-forming system is proposed. And then the architecture of a multi-agent based collaborative design system is introduced, with defining all the agents of the architecture in detail. Agents communicate with each other using XML technology. Based on it, a prototype system using JavaEE environment is developed. Customers and designers can access the system by internet, customers input product parameters, designers design the roll, and simulation program simulate the design parameters to decide whether the parameters is reasonable and send feedback message to designers. All data are stored in database to carry out data mining and to provide intelligent support. A case study is given at the end of this paper to validate the course of using this multi-agent system.