An intelligent agent-based collaborative workflow for inter-enterprise PCB product design

• Published in: 2007 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management pp. 189 - 193
• Main Authors: Huang, C.J., Liao, L.M.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.12.2007
• Subjects: agent; collaboration; Collaborative tools; Collaborative work; Industrial engineering; Intelligent agent; Multiagent systems; PCB design; Process design; Product design; Product development; Teamwork; workflow; Workflow management software
• ISBN: 1424415284; 9781424415281
• ISSN: 2157-3611; 2157-362X
• DOI: 10.1109/IEEM.2007.4419177

Currently, there is tremendous pressure to design and develop products in a short period of time to reduce time-to-market and project's life cycle. Researchers often propose workflow management system as a mechanism to facilitate teamwork in a collaborative product development environment. In this paper, we develop an agent-based collaborative workflow platform (ACWP), in which a group of intelligent agents work autonomously and collaboratively to perform workflow tasks and access data from a distributed environment. By the aid of intelligent agents, our system can execute customized workflow tasks for inter-enterprise users based on their individual requests, and conquer the complexity of product design in distributed, heterogeneous platform. The application of multi-agent systems ACWP for collaborative workflow management is investigated through an inter-enterprise PCB product design. ACWP facilitates PCB product design and team interaction in a collaborative but distributed product development environment and moves up the whole performance of design process.