SHARE: A Scalable Framework and Methodology for Concurrent Engineering

Table of Contents:

  1. Principal Investigator.
  2. Productivity Measures.
  3. Summary of Objectives and Approach.
  4. Detailed Summary of Technical Progress.
  5. Transitions and DOD Interactions.
  6. Software and Hardware Prototypes.
  7. List of Publications.
  8. Invited and Contributed Presentations.
  9. Honors, Prizes or Awards Received.
  10. Project personnel promotions obtained.
  11. Project Staff.
  12. Multimedia URL.
  13. Keywords.
  14. Business Office.
  15. Expenditures.
  16. Students.
  17. Book Plans.
  18. Sabbatical Plans.
  19. Related Research.
  20. History.

Principal Investigator.

Productivity Measures.

Summary of Objectives and Approach.

The objective of this work is to help teams of engineers achieve a shared understanding of their designs and design processes, using agent-based computational tools and services for communication, collaboration, analysis, and synthesis.

    The approach is based on developing:
  1. design representations that encompass decisions and rationale linked to the design artifact
  2. A distributed architecture that enables agents (human and computational) to communicate and cooperate in solving engineering problems
  3. Incremental, interactive concurrent engineering tools for analysis and synthesis
As the SHARE tools and environment are developed, they are tested on industry-sponsored design projects. Their impact on the design process is analyzed to assess their effectiveness and provide a basis for models of concurrent design and redesign processes.

Detailed Summary of Technical Progress.

  1. A mature edition of the SHARE environment, including the PENS electronic notebook has been developed and tested by engineering design teams in ME210. The SHARE environment was used by all ME210 teams, two of which had team members that were remotely located: in Washington and one in Pennsylvania. This year, all teams have remote participants, three of them are international: one in Spain, one in the Netherlands, and one in Sweden. Supporting files for each project were captured on laptop computers and published on CDROMs and the World Wide Web, and analyzed to study design processes and design re-use. Exercising SHARE in real design activity continues to guide development of the next generation environment.
  2. The original SHARE First-Link work on agent-based software for design collaboration has continued through a joint project with Lockheed on cable harness design and through collaboration with the SHADE project (DAAA 15-91-C0104) to develop agents that share models for engineering analysis. A major result has been the development of a demonstrable and reusual agent-based framework for distributed cooperating engineering tools. The Redux' agent, was integrated and tested with the original First-Link agents. The result is NEXT-LINK, an agent message protocol and generic services that can be reused with different CAD tools, as well as a model for writing agent "wrappers". In this system, Redux' is a generic agent, which may be located anywhere on the Internet, that keeps track of goals, dependencies, contingencies, conflicts and rationale for decisions in a collaborative design project. One of the most important results has been the detection of opportunities to improve a design that would typically have been lost. The Redux' agent also coordinates the assignment of agents to tasks and the availability of input information as well as design version control.
  3. SHARE is also collaborating with Sandia National Laboratories to develop an agile, Internet-based service for design and manufacturing on the Sandia Intelligent Agents for Manufacturing project,of which the CDR SIAM project is part. Demonstration agents using JAVA(tm) have been constructed.
  4. The SHARE team joined with other MADE projects in MADEFAST to collaboratively design an infrared seeker prototype. The design team used SHARE collaboration tools to facilitate communications and sharing of information over the Internet. The result was not only a demonstration (video is available) that a seeker could be designed and built collabortive by distributed participants with no management hierarchy in six (6) months, but also an extensive web of design and process data useful for future experiments.
  5. The SHARE and Lockheed have developed and demonstrated a working prototype of ACaPS: an Internet-based service for design and manufacture of wire harness assemblies. ACaPS work continues as part of the AIMS project.
  6. In cooperation with the SHADE project, agents were constructed for controls, dynamics and structural analysis in the SHARE STRAND project. Agents incorporate commercial software (e.g., Matlab/Simulink), knowledge-based systems shells and solid modelers. In the SHARE Concur , these agents exploit ontologies for knowledge sharing and the KQML Application Programming Interface for communicating via multiple protocols and transport mechanisms. In particular, this last project added the mechanical components ontology.

Transitions and DOD Interactions.

  1. 17 different industrial groups (FMC, Hughes, Peterbuilt, Schick, Baxter, Stanford Children's Hospital, Stanford Medical School, NASA, Nikon, GM, DEC, Western Digital, 3M, CapSnap, Western Sky, AT&T, DVI, Boeing) participated in the SHARE ME210 testbed environment. 3M, NASA and Hughes corresponded regularly with design teams via SHARE. Electronic documents were delivered to industrial sponsors for redesign and published as a design library on the World Wide Web.
  2. Collaboration continues between SHARE and NASA Ames' DEDAL project, including sharing of design records captured under SHARE. EIT is transforming DEDAL for question-based indexing of semi-structured information on the Internet.
  3. In ACaPS, Lockheed and SHARE built a prototype for converting Lockheed's cable harness production facility into an agile service over the Internet.
  4. In the MADEFAST, SHARE tools were used for collaboration with Rockwell Palo Alto Research Labs, Texas Instruments, Hughes, the University of Utah, Carnegie Mellon University and Michigan State University.
  5. The NEXT-LINK results have been used by Hughes and are being incorporated into the ARPA TTO SBD project by Lockheed.

Software and Hardware Prototypes.

  1. Prototype Name: PENS (Personal Electronic Notebook with Sharing)

List of Publications.

  1. C. Petrie, T. Webster, and M. Cutkosky," Using Pareto Optimality to Coordinate Distributed Agents," Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (AIEDAM), 9, 269-281, 1995. Abstract available
  2. J. Hong, G. Toye, and L. Leifer, "Personal Electronic Notebook with Sharing," Proc. 4th WET ICE, pp. 88-94, April, 1995, West Virginia, IEEE Press.
  3. G.Toye, M.Cutkosky, L.J.Leifer, J.M.Tenenbaum and J. Glicksman, "SHARE: A Methodology and Environment for Collaborative Product Development," in Int. J. of Intelligent and Cooperative Information Systems, 1994. Abstract available
  4. H.Park, M.Cutkosky, A.B.Conru and S-H. Lee, "An Agent-Based Approach to Concurrent Cable Harness Design," Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, Vol. 8, 1994, pp. 45-61. Abstract available
  5. C.Petrie, M.Cutkosky and H.Park, "Design Space Navigation," Proceedings of Third Int. Conf. on AI in Design, August 1994, Lausanne, Switzerland. Abstract available
  6. G.Olsen, M.Cutkosky and J.M.Tenenbaum and T.R.Gruber, "Collaborative Engineering based on Knowledge Sharing Agreements," to be presented at the 1994 ASME Engineering Database Symposium. Abstract available
  7. S. Kambhampati, M. R. Cutkosky, J. M. Tenenbaum and S-H Lee, "Integrating General Purpose Planners and Specialized Reasoners: Case Study of a Hybrid Planning Architecture," IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics,, Vol. 23, No. 6, November/December, 1993, pp. 1503-1518. Abstract available
  8. A.Conru and M.Cutkosky, "Computational Support for Interactive Cable Harness Routing and Design," Advances in Design Automation, DE-Vol 65-1, Proceedings of the 1993 ASME Design Automation Conf., Albuquerque, NM., Sept 19-22, 1993, pp. 551-558. Abstract available
  9. V.Kumar, J.Glicksman, G.A.Kramer, "A SHAREd Web To Support Design Teams," Proceedings of IEEE Third Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, April 17-19, 1994, Morgantown, WV. Abstract available
  10. Baudin, Catherine; Kedar, Smadar; Underwood, Jody G.; Baya, Vinod; "Question-based Acquisition of Conceptual Indices for Multimedia Design Documentation" , In proceedings of the 11th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-93, Washington D.C., pp 452-458, July 1993.
  11. Baudin, Catherine; Underwood, Jody G.; Baya, Vinod; "Using Device Models to Facilitate the Retrieval of Multimedia Design Information" , In proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chambery, France, pp 1237-1243, August 29-September 2,1993.

Invited and Contributed Presentations.

  1. ISAT Demonstration: An invited presentation of the MadeFast project was given by on August 26, 1994 by M. Cutkosky and G. Toye at the ARPA meeting in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
  2. At the ARPA MADE Program Workshop in Salt Lake City, Utah, on Thursday, November 10th, (PowerPoint slides available) the MADEFAST seeker was publicly demonstrated to work.
  3. PowerPoint slides were furnished to Pradeep Khosla in June, 1994, for the annual ARPA MADE briefing.
  4. MADEFAST and Agent-Based Engineering (ABE) were presented at the July, 1995 ARPA MADE PI meeting, hosted by the Stanford Center For Design Research. Slides are available.
  5. Mark Cutkosky presented MADEFAST at the ARPA SISTO symposium (STISS) in August, 1995.
  6. Using the WWW for a Team-Based Engineering Design Class: A presentation was given by Jack Hong, George Toye, and Larry Leifer as part of the CS547 Human-Computer Interaction Seminar on September 29, 1995.
  7. The Next-Link project was the subject of the keynote address given by Charles Petrie at the German Conference on Knowledge-based Systems XPS-95 in March, 1995.
  8. "An Experiment in Coordination of Distributed Agents" was a talk given by Charles Petrie in August and September of 1994 at the following sites:
  9. "The Next-Link Project": talk given by Charles Petrie at the Informs Conference, Los Angeles, May, 1995.
  10. "Agent-Based Engineering": talk given by Charles Petrie at the OOPSLA Workshop on Objects, Scripts and the Web in Austin, Texas, October, 1995.

Honors, Prizes or Awards Received.

Project Personnel Promotions Obtained.

Project Staff.

  1. Name:Dr. Larry Leifer
  2. Name:Dr. Mark Cutkosky
  3. Name:Dr. Charles Petrie
  4. Name:Dr. George Toye

Misc Hypermedia.

  1. EOYL FY95
  2. QUAD FY95
  3. EOYL FY94
  4. All CDR SHARE projects are on the WWW.
  5. A viedo of the MADEFAST project is available.
  6. Video tapes of all ME210 presentations have been made. In addition, CD-ROMs containing all ME210 design documentation are now available.
  7. The WWW Mechanical Engineering Virtual Library is maintained by the CDR and references the SHARE projects.
  8. The Sandia Intelligent Agents for Manufacturing (SIAM) project pages reference the CDR SHARE-based work.
  9. The SHARE Next-Link project is referenced by many other sites such as the UMass DIS Laboratory, Ralph Becket's Intelligent Software Agents page, the Webography of AI in Design resource, and the Multi-Agent Systems Webliography.
  10. Most of the CDR SHARE technical reports. are available on-line.

Keywords.

  1. ABSML
  2. ACaPS
  3. DEDAL
  4. First-Link
  5. GCDK
  6. ICM
  7. ISAT
  8. MADE
  9. MADEFAST
  10. ME210
  11. MediaKit
  12. Mmphone
  13. Next-Link
  14. REDUX
  15. SHADE
  16. SHARE
  17. StoryBoard

Business Office

Expenditures

  1. Est. FY96: None
  2. FY95: 61%
  3. FY94: 100%
  4. FY93: 100%

Students

  1. Name: Mr. Heecheol Jeon
  2. Name: Dr. Teresa Webster
  3. Name: Mr. Jack Hong
  4. Name: Mr. Brian Luehrs

Book Plans

Sabbatical Plans

Related Research

  1. Next-Link related research covers most of the agent-based SHARE-related work.
  2. The WWW Mechanical Engineering Virtual Library is managed with SHARE funding.
  3. The DesignNet resouce is also managed with SHARE funding.

History