Development of engineering framework and portal for the integration of cooperative engineering processes

Product development is a complex activity that involves the integration of design/analysis processes and distributed resources such as human beings, engineering tools, and data. This paper presents a multi-agent-based engineering framework and engineering service portal to support such complex engineering design problems. The engineering framework integrates various engineering processes such as design and analysis, which involve complex engineering processes, huge amounts of information processing and problem solving. The web-based engineering service portal provides a user interface for the engineering framework and shares the results between engineers who are participating in the engineering problem. Several engineering problems are applied to the framework and its usefulness is validated.