Supporting Evolution in a Multi-Agent Cooperative Design Environment

Abstract

New architectures for next-generation of computer-aided design environments need to be distributed, evolutive, and cooperative. This paper presents a multi-agent design environment that supports cooperative and evolutionary design by cooperation of a group of agents. Multi-agent system architecture offers a promising framework with its novel approach for dynamically creating and managing agent communities in widely distributed and ever-changing design environments; while the genetic algorithm based approach provides a foundation for supporting evolutionary and innovative design abilities. The computational and information processing processes involved in. evolutionary and distributed environment are discussed in this paper. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.