Title: Agent facilitated integration of distributed PDM systems

Authors: Yinsheng Li, Weiming Shen, Hamada Ghenniwa

Addresses: National Research Council Canada, London, Ontario, Canada. ' National Research Council Canada, London, Ontario, Canada. ' Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada

Abstract: This paper analyses challenges in integrating distributed and heterogeneous PDM systems in a virtual enterprise-like environment, and introduces multi-agent solutions for the integration. With interactive and communicative agents as community and domain professional services, a set of infrastructure and facilities, which support secure distributed management of product documents, workflows and engineering knowledge, have been proposed and described in detail. With this paradigm, distributed PDM systems perform as a virtual unified product development platform, engineers are allowed to collaborate with each other as conveniently as in a single workspace. Considering standardised multi-agents and fundamental product data managed by PDM systems, the proposed paradigm is prospective in combining with higher-end e-business and growing into a virtual-enterprise level integrated system.

Keywords: product data management; PDM; distributed product development; virtual enterprise; agents; multi-agent systems; agent-based systems; collaborative engineering.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNVO.2004.005135

International Journal of Networking and Virtual Organisations, 2004 Vol.2 No.2, pp.133 - 152

Published online: 04 Sep 2004 *

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