A User-centered Multi-agent Framework for Extensible Modular Design

To target both present users and future potential customers, which are often ignored by most researches, very early in the collaborative conceptual design stage, a multi-agent framework is presented to integrate the distributed design activities. By introducing a cost-effective and timely modular design system and modeling its 'users', a typical intelligent and autonomous agent is constructed and the principle of cooperation among multiple agents is discussed for maximizing today's and tomorrow's customer requirements. The proposed system is successfully demonstrated on the hydraulic press products design.