An agent-based approach for coordinating product design workflows

New product development processes in manufacturing organizations are distributed and knowledge-intensive. Such product development processes interleave complex manual and software-enabled design decision-making activities. In current approaches to product development, design activities are accomplished by teams of engineers in an ad hoc, resource-intensive manner. Though well-developed tools exist for enabling individual engineering activities, support for autonomous coordination of distributed design tasks is minimal. In this paper, we present an Agent-based Process Coordination (APC) framework for distributed design process management. The proposed approach embeds autonomous agents in a workflow-based distributed systems infrastructure. The framework utilizes a centralized decision-making and task sharing approach to support design activities. A design process plan is executed by a centralized coordination agent with the help of service agents. We evaluate the applicability of the APC framework to support design in an industrial context with a case study. The study illustrates the utility of deploying agent-based workflow technologies to: (a) enable incremental and large-scale process and product knowledge acquisition and management, (b) facilitate design process knowledge reuse in different contexts, and (c) support distributed dynamic process management.