The Distributed Engineering Vision
We want to enable engineers to cooperate in the common design of an artifact. The engineers may work in different domains of expertise and may be geographically dispersed. They may work on heterogeneous systems and tools. This project assumes successful research in the areas of protocols for heterogeneous computational agents and common ontologies for design and engineering. Next-Link focuses on the coordination layer of an infrastructure for distributed concurrent engineering.
Specifically, Next-Link is developing a coordination agent for the domain of aircraft electrical cable configuration and routing using a novel theory of design decisions.
What's the problem?
Modern planes, submarines, buildings, etc. are all built today with
many people from many companies, even countries. What else needs to be
done? As always, the problem is time and cost. We hypothesize that
one major contribution to time and cost is the necessity for layers of
middle management to connect the engineers in different disciplines
and organizations. Our goal is to facilitate more direct
peer-to-peer communications about design and engineering
changes.
It is worth noting that the common use of a large data repository does not accomplish this goal. While this project takes a distributed approach, the real issue is that common data does not ensure coordination. The scenario presented in these web pages shows an example of how even a very simple problem quickly becomes too complex for such an approach to help.
The user is invited to begin with a short description of some of the technical issues of distributed engineering, only one of which is the little addressed problem of coordination.
Design Space Navigation
as a Collaborative Aid
Abstract or
Report .
Using Pareto Optimality to
Coordinate Distributed Agents
Abstract or
Report (PostScript) / (HTML).
Combining Constraint Propagation and Backtracking
for
Distributed Engineering
(PostScript)
/
(HTML).