"Concurrent Engineering (CE) has already initiated a cultural change in the design and manufacturing of new products. It is expected to lead to better engineered and faster built products. But, in order for a company to take advantage of the power of CE, the members of product development teams have to be educated in the CE method of product development and how decisions made about one aspect of a design can affect other aspects. They also have to be educated in the usefulness of the tools that can be used for CE. Those tools include intelligent agents which can be used to offer design suggestions and criticisms. The goal of this project is to build a computer system which will simulate a design environment and demonstrate the essential aspects of CE, in a way that they can be intuitively understood. It is supported by a grant from the Competitive Product Development Institute at the Digital Equipment Corporation."

"A Single Function Agent (SiFA) is a software agent, with only one function, one point of view, and one target object on which to act. For example, an agent might be a critic (function) of material (target) from the point of view of cost. This research investigates the possibilities and implications of the SiFA concept, and analyzes the definition language, negotiation language and negotiation strategies of the agents. After defining a domain-independent set of agent types we investigated negotiation, analyzing which pairs/groups of agents have reason to communicate, and what the information passed between them should be, as well as what knowledge was needed to support the negotiation. A library for the CLIPS expert system shell was built, which allows development of SiFA based expert systems from domain independent templates. We will present two such systems, one as implemented for the domain of ceramic component material selection and the other (in development) for simple sailboat design. The effect of negotiation on the design process and the results are discussed, as well as directions for future research into SiFAs."

"Design is a very complicated and ill-defined problem solving activity. Routine parametric design is a more restricted and well-defined version of design problems. Even this restricted version requires many different kinds of expert knowledge and the ability to perform a variety of tasks. One approach to solving this restricted version is to use Single Function Agents (SiFAs), each of which can perform a very specialized task, from a single point of view. The ability to represent expertise with different points of view is very important in design. These different points of view usually cause conflicts among agents, and these conflicts need to be resolved in order for the design process to be successful. Therefore, agents need to be capable of detecting and resolving these conflicts. This thesis presents a model of conflicts and negotiations in the SiFA framework. Some extensions to the present state of the SiFA paradigm are introduced. A hierarchy of possible conflicts is proposed and the steps of the negotiation process are discussed. The ability of agents to negotiation in order to resolve conflicts makes SiFA-based design systems more versatile, less brittle, and easier to construct and maintain. Also, the extended SiFA paradigm, where agents have negotiation capabilities leads to many interesting directions for further research. "