Agent-based distributed design system architecture for basic ship design

This paper proposes an agent-based distributed design system architecture for complicated, large engineering systems and develops an experimental implementation of the architecture for basic ship design. First, dependency and concurrency in design activities of an engineering system are discussed from the viewpoints of hierarchical system structure and entity-and-attribute relationship. It reveals the possibilities of parallel execution of design operations from a systematic viewpoint. Second, the design operations are classified into generating system structures, configuring spatial arrangement, determining system attributes and selecting system components, in the architecture. design operations for attributes that are major parts are modeled with object orientation, and they are distributed to agents by extending an object-oriented programming technique to an agent approach. The others are encapsulated as independent task agents. After describing key concepts for its computer implementation, this paper shows an application for basic ship design.