Our target domain is aircraft electric cable harness design, based on
the previous work in the
First-Link project.
We call the target system NEXT-LINK. If successful, it will be
an aircraft cable harness design system that can not only be used by
geographically dispersed engineers over a wide area network (WAN), but
we will have a generic distributed engineering framework that will be
trasferrable to other application domains.
The Next-Link architecture has three top-level elements:
- The First-Link domain-specific agents including:
- the task-specific agents, such as the CE; and
- the design manager which
- initiates the design,
- watches overall progress, and
- has special constraint resolution authority;
- The Project Manager (under design),
-
The Constraint Manager (under construction),
- The wrapper "middleware":
SHADE KAPI, and
-
The Redux' agent that can be used as a
generic coordination resource
for engineering projects.
To see how the scenario is accomplished, please
see
the Redux' agent page.
______________________________________________________
Charles Petrie