ABE Publications

This hyperdocument is under continuous construction.

Here you can find some of our recent papers.


H.R. Frost and M.R. Cutkosky, "Design for Manufacturability via Agent Interaction"

S. Goldmann, "Project Coordination "

C. Petrie, H. Jeon, and M. Cutkosky, "A Constraint Manager Agent for Distributed Engineering Constraint Coordination: First Report"

C. Petrie, "Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence"


Abstracts:

H.R. Frost and M.R. Cutkosky, "Design for Manufacturability via Agent Interaction"

We describe an approach for making the capability of novel manufacturing processes manifest to designers starting with the earliest stages of geometry specification. The approach involves a dialogue among design and manufacturing agents over the Internet. The dialogue focuses on the specification and exchange of process capability models which enable a designer to evaluate the manufacturability of design elements. The models include both declarative knowledge and, for those aspects of the process that are difficult to represent declaratively, platform-independent procedural code which is automatically loaded onto the designers' machine. The approach has been implemented using agents written in the Java language which exchange feature-based capability models. The approach is being tested initially on machining and shape-deposition processes.

S. Goldmann, "Project Coordination "

Procura is a Project Management tool which allows the planning and scheduling of agent based design projects in a hierarchical top-down approach. Since the information which is available while the top-level planning and scheduling is done is usually incomplete, the decisions made at this level will often need to be revised as soon as more information becomes available, and conditions change. Procura facilitates the necessary replanning, making use of Redux', a design support tool which can keep track of decisions, rejection of decisions, and their rationales.

C. Petrie, H. Jeon, and M. Cutkosky, "A Constraint Manager Agent for Distributed Engineering Constraint Coordination: First Report"

We describe an agent-based approach for engineering problems in which the constraints and general control of problem solving are distributed. In order to overcome previous problems with engineering constraint solvers, we divide responsibilities between domain-specific agents, which control the overall problem solving, and generic, reusable agents. One of these generic agents is Redux'[Petrie 1993], which provides general problem solving bookkeeping services. Another is a Constraint Manager, which provides constraint consistency services. We demonstrate that the utility of this approach on a previously-defined simple, but difficult distributed constraint problem.

C. Petrie, "Agent-Based Engineering, the Web, and Intelligence"

We describe the use of KQML-like Agents and their compatibility with the World-Wide Web. One distinguishing characteristic of such agents is the necessity for a peer-to-peer protocol vs. The client-server protocol of HTTP. This is indicative of a major conflict between the web and agent paradigms that must be resolved for integration of the two technologies, both of which are useful for design and engineering applications. We also note that "intelligence" is not a necessary property of useful agents and is not helpful in distinguishing agents from other kinds of software.

Mike Binnard <binnard@cdr.stanford.edu>