ADN: An Agent-Based Decision Network for Concurrent Design and Manufacturing

Abstract Engineering design is a complex process. Even in designing a simple product, tens, if not hundreds, of decisions must be made by a single designer or manufacturer. The problem gets more complex when a group of designers work as a team to design an artifact. In this paper, we take a decision-based approach to model design process and introduce an agent-based decision network (ADN) to support concurrent decision-making and collaboration in design and manufacturing. Our research on ADN focuses on making team members consider other members’ decisions when making their owns and attempts to achieve coherent design decisions among designers by explicitly representing and capturing individual design decisions and negotiation processes. To achieve this goal we introduce a decision-based design process model (DDPM) and a condition-based negotiation model (CNM). The DDPM was developed to capture individual designers’ design processes. The CNM was developed to facilitate condition-based negotiation process and to track both conditions generated and decisions made at each design stage for downstream negotiation support. In ADN, each designer is associated with an agent and both the DDPM and CNM are captured and facilitated by agents and are not explicitly visible to designers. Agents generate and utilize the DDPM and CNM information to support their designers. This paper describes the ADN framework in detail, points out its advantages, and presents an application example to demonstrate the effectiveness of the ADN framework.