NEXT-LINK addresses the problem of coordination. To begin, consider design maintenance. New engineers, even in the same domain, must understand why previous engineers made design decisions. The reasons often consist of not only why a choice was made, but also how specifications and constraints interact with other design decisions. When making a change to a system, the maintenance engineer must understand how the change will propagate to other parts of the system. This is generally understood to be a design documentation problem.
But these same considerations are also important at design time for engineers to cooperate with each other. The coordination problem then is to allow two or more engineers at their computers to independently make design decisions and have the computers do some of the bookkeeping work in managing the decision interactions. And such a system must be active.
We want to provide some automatic help in managing the design process. Our goal is to develop a generic framework for distributed design systems. There is currently no general technology for coordinating engineering design.
As a first cut, we are making a domain-independent agent based on the Redux theory of design decisions. One feature of this agent is that it automates some of the generation of design rationales. Another feature is that it uses simple automatically constructed design rationales to propagate changes in the design, in a predictable and useful way.
Next-Link is a defined set of messages, their protocol, and interfaces that allow domain agents, Redux, and other generic service agents to "plug and play". We are currently working on a Constraint Manager that will interface with a variety of existing constraint prolblem solvers. Other candidates for generic service agents would help with sensitivity analysis and negotiation. This is described in more detail in The Deliverable.
However, the first issue is to understand the problem of coordination, which is not generally well-studied. To see an example of coordination in the NEXT-LINK domain, see a cable design scenario.
______________________________________________________
Charles Petrie