Keywords: multi-agent system, steel structures, structural design, collaborative design.

Agent technology is recognized as a promising paradigm for the next generation of design and manufacturing systems. Research centres have already applied multi-agent paradigm with some success to concurrent engineering, collaborative engineering design, manufacturing planning, supply chain management and many other domains. It is argued that such systems are capable of supporting better communication and coordination and enhanced interoperability amongst design teams. The emergence of new information technologies and programming languages that support distributed computing (e.g. C# and Microsoft .Net remoting) has made developing such systems more feasible.

This paper gives an overview of a collaborative design system. This is an ongoing research aimed at investigating the potentials of using software agent technology in aiding multi-disciplinary and collaborative design activities. The vision is to provide a workspace where designers are able to work collaboratively with adequate level of concurrency on a shared model and carry out most necessary communication and data exchanges electronically.

A proposed system to achieve such a vision is discussed in this paper. Agents in the system will play the main roles in both the design and communication processes. The system is intended to be as a proof of concept. It will first be applied to architectural-structural engineering domain and in particular the structural design of multi-storey steel framed-structures.

The system is introduced through defining the high-level requirements, the system architecture and the software analysis and design of the main components.

A number of high-level requirements considered necessary to achieve the system's vision were identified. Collaboration, design automation and product modelling are considered significant requirements.

The system adopts client/server architecture. It consists of a central server maintaining the design models and many workstations where designers can access the model data via a network. System analysis was conducted to identify: the Agent Model which defines the required agents and their main roles and tasks, the Communication Model which defines communication scenarios between the agents and the Knowledge Model which defines the representation of the data of the building. Two groups of software agents are identified. Agents involve in the design process which are interface agent, design agent and structural analysis agent and agents involved in the communication process which are model agent, monitor agent and mediator agent. IFC product model is adopted as the domain knowledge in the system.

The software design included the design of the agents and the database. It was decided to implement two types of agents: generic and specialised. The generic software agent will provide all required basic functionalities of agents while each specialised agent will inherit all the functionalities of the generic agent and add to it its own specialisation using the inheritance and encapsulation features of object-oriented programming. The model database design defines the access control modes and the database structure. The access modes are pessimistic, optimistic and pessimistic- optimistic. The model database is an object-oriented structure that supports import/export of IFC files, merging of various versions of the model with the ability to uniquely identify an object as well as preserve information about its ownership.

The paper raised a number of challenges required to be addressed in order to meet a set requirements. It is a challenge implementing data merging techniques that facilitate the concurrent access to the shared model and allow for merging various modifications without losing data consistency. Another challenge is constructing the agents exploiting the latest technology to be able to achieve their allocated tasks.

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