Development of a collaborative virtual maintenance environment with agent technology

This paper proposed a virtual environment with agent technology to facilitate the integration and cooperation of product maintenance process. The agent-based system framework, in which various intelligent agents worked together to perform product maintenance tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way, is addressed. The functional definition of each intelligent agent is presented and the agent internal structure is designed. Moreover, ontology-based agents communication mechanism and agents co-operation model are proposed, and an intelligent algorithm based on fuzzy comprehensive evaluation is designed to solve competition conflicts among the agents. Finally, the prototype system is developed and the algorithm is proved feasible and efficient.