Jay M. Tenenbaum

PACT: an experiment in integrating concurrent engineering systems

The Palo Alto Collaborative Testbed (PACT), a concurrent engineering infrastructure that encompasses multiple sites, subsystems, and disciplines, is discussed. The PACT systems include NVisage, a distributed knowledge-based integration environment for design tools; DME (Device Modeling Environment), a model formulation and simulation environment; Next-Cut, a mechanical design and process planning system; and Designworld, a digital electronics design, simulation, assembly, and testing system. The motivations for PACT and the significance of the approach for concurrent engineering is discussed. Initial experiments in distributed simulation and incremental redesign are reviewed, and PACTs agent-based architecture and lessons learned from the PACT experiments are described.<<ETX>>

An XML framework for agent-based E-commerce

C ommerceNet’s eCo System initiative, launched in 1996, aims to transform the World-Wide Web into an agent-based infrastructure for Internet commerce. Today’s Web gives people unprecedented access to online information and services. But its information is delivered in format-oriented, handcrafted hypertext markup language (HTML), making it understandable only through human eyes. Software agents and search engines have difficulty using the information because it is not semantically encoded. Clever programmers work around some of HTML’s inherent limitations by using proprietary tags or software that “scrapes” Web pages to extract content. Unfortunately, such ad hoc approaches do not scale. Proprietary tags require browser plug-ins, and scraping approaches require a customized script for each Web site. These approaches balkanize the Web, making it inaccessible to agents. Emerging standards for commercial document exchange promise open business-to-business e-commerce.

SHADE: Technology for knowledge-based collaborative engineering

Effective information sharing and decision coordination are vital to collaborative product development and integrated manufacturing. However, typical special-purpose CAE systems tend to isolate information at tool boundaries, and typical integrated CAE systems tend to limit flexibility and process innovation. The SHADE (SHAred Dependency Engineering) project strikes a balance between these undesirable extremes by supporting reconfigurable exchange of engineering knowledge among special-purpose CAE systems. SHADEs approach has three main components: a shared knowledge representation (language and domain-specific vocabulary), protocols supporting information exchange for change notification and subscription, and facilitation services for content-directed routing and intelligent matching of information consumers and producers.

Toward a Knowledge Medium for Collaborative Product Development

Information sharing and decision coordination are central problems for large-scale product development. This paper proposes a framework for supporting a knowledge medium (Stefik 1986): a computational environment in which explicitly represented knowledge serves as a communication medium among people and their programs. The framework is designed to support information sharing and coordinated communication among members of a product development organization, particularly for the tasks of design knowledge capture, dynamic notification of design changes, and active management of design dependencies. The proposed technology consists of a shared knowledge representation (language and vocabulary), protocols for foreign data encapsulation and posting to the shared environment, and mechanisms for content-directed routing of posted information to interested parties via subscription and notification services. A range of possible applications can be explored in this framework, depending on the degree of commitment to a shared representation by participating tools. A number of research issues, fundamental to building such a knowledge medium, are introduced in the paper.

Madefast: collaborative engineering over the Internet

olitical, economic, and technological forces are changing the landscape of engineering. As the world’s economies become more interconnected and more competitive, there is an increasing need for organizations to form joint design and manufacturing teams that collaborate for the life of a project and then disperse. For example, a new electromechanical product may involve a mechanical design group in Boston working closely with a control systems subcontractor in California and an OEM partner in Singapore. Similar challenges face defense contractors who need to respond rapidly to new requirements. The ARPA Manufacturing Automation and Design Engineering (MADE) program has been developing Internet-based tools, services, protocols, and design methodologies that will allow contractors to compose teams of specialists from different locations and organizations as project needs arise. As a practical test of what the MADE program has achieved, members of the MADE community undertook an ambitious exercise in Madefast: Collaborative Engineering over the Internet

An intelligent agent framework for enterprise integration

The authors present a framework in which human and intelligent agents (IAs) can interact to facilitate the information flow and decision making in real-world enterprises. Underlying the framework is the notion of an enterprise model that is built by dividing complex enterprise operations into a collection of elementary tasks or activities. Each such task is then modeled in cognitive terms and entrusted to an IA for execution. Tasks that require human involvement are referred to the appropriate person through their personal assistant, a special type of IA that knows how to communicate both with humans, through multimedia interfaces, and with other IAs and the shared knowledge base. The computer-aided software engineering tools supported by a library of activity models permit every individual in an enterprise to model the activities with which they are personally most familiar. The preliminary experimental results suggest that this divide-and-conquer strategy, leading to cognitive models that are buildable and maintainable by end-users, is a viable approach to real-world distributed artificial intelligence. >

Eco System: an Internet commerce architecture

Robust electronic commerce will require several proprietary systems to interoperate. CommerceNet is proposing Eco System, a cross industry effort to build a framework of frameworks, involving both e-commerce vendors and end users. Eco System will consist of an extensible object oriented framework (class libraries, application programming interfaces and shared services) from which developers can assemble applications quickly from existing components. These applications could subsequently be reused in other applications. We are also developing a Common Business Language (CBL) that lets application agents communicate using messages and objects that model communications in the real business world. A network services architecture (protocols, APIs, and data formats) will insulate application agents from each other and from platform dependencies, while facilitating their interoperation. Functionally, Eco System fills three distinct roles. It is: a layer of middleware that facilitates agent interoperation through services such as authentication, billing, payment, and directories; an object oriented development environment that encourages the reuse of e-commerce modules (even modules that represent the product line of an entire company); and an industry roadmap and interoperability example that promotes open standards and helps technology vendors communicate with end users about product features.

Collaborative Engineering Based on Knowledge Sharing Agreements

The design of products by multi-disciplinary groups is a knowledge intensive activity Collaborators must be able to exchange informa tion and share some common understanding of the informatons content The hope, however, that an integrated workbench of application tools will span the needs of engineering collaborators is misplaced We argue that an integrated workbench of application tools cannot meet the long- term needs of engineering collaborators Moreover, standards cannot satisfy the information sharing needs of collaborators, because these needs are dynamic

A methodology and computational framework for concurrent product and process design

Abstract We describe a methodology for Concurrent Product and Process Design and a computational framework that supports it. The methodology is based on the premise that manufacturability is best assured by simultaneously designing a part or assembly and the process used to fabricate it. The designer works in “manufacturing modes”, adding features to the design or manipulating the process plan itself. The computational framework to support this methodology is inspired by human team design and consists of cooperating experts (human and computational) that critique and refine a design from multiple perspectives (e.g. tooling, fixturing, path planning, materials).

Integrating general purpose planners and specialized reasoners: case study of a hybrid planning architecture

Many real-world planning problems involve substantial amounts of domain-specific reasoning that is either awkward or inefficient to encode in a general purpose planner. A hybrid planning architecture for such domains is proposed. It utilizes a set of specialists to complement both the overall expressiveness and the efficiency of a traditional hierarchical planner. Such an architecture promises to retain the flexibility and generality of a classical planning framework while allowing deeper and more efficient domain-specific reasoning through specialists. The architecture has several ramifications on the internal operations of the planner as well as its interactions with the specialists. Continual interactions between the planner and the specialists necessitate an incremental, interactive, and least-commitment oriented approach to planning. As the planner and the specialists in such a model may use heterogeneous reasoning mechanisms and representations, a complete understanding of the operations of one by the other is not possible. >