Engineering change management through consensus seeking by fuzzy agents

Uncertainty is a feature of the collaborative and distributed design process. Dilemmas can be found face to change of specifications, product functions, elementary solutions, and process constraints. This situation leads to consensus seeking during the collaborative and distributed design process. The contribution of this paper consists in modelling and implementation of consensus by agent technology. Consensus agents are implemented in a fuzzy agent-based platform. The robust parts of configurations are found. It permits the designer to distinguish the robust components and flexible ones in a set configuration.