Ming Xi Tang

Design and implementation of an agent-based collaborative product design system

The evolution of computer science and technology has brought new opportunities for multidisciplinary designers and engineers to collaborate with each other in a concurrent and coordinated manner. The development of computational agents with unified data structures and software protocols contributes to the establishment of a new way of working in collaborative design, which is increasingly becoming an international practice. In this paper, based on the analysis of the dynamic nature of collaborative design process, a new framework for collaborative design is described. This framework adopts an agent-based approach and relocates designers, managers, systems, and the supporting agents in a unified knowledge representation scheme for product design. In order to model the constantly evolving design process and the rationales resulted from design collaboration, a Collaborative Product Data Model (CPDM) and a constraint-based Collaborative Design Process Model (CDPM) are proposed to facilitate the management and coordination of the collaborative design process as well as design knowledge management. A prototype system of the proposed framework is implemented and its feasibility is evaluated using a real design scenario whose objective is designing a set of dining table and chairs.

A representation of context for computer supported collaborative design

This paper presents a computational definition of design context and discusses its role for collaborative design. A brief review of design representation and modeling approaches is given first. This is followed by a discussion on the necessity for modeling design context in collaborative design. This discussion provides a basis for a definition of design context and a description of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods for representing and reasoning about this design context. The development of an intelligent collaborative design system supporting context management is presented. Finally, the limitations of our current approach to representing design contexts, and possible ways for future improvement are discussed.

Integrating shape grammars into a generative system for Zhuang ethnic embroidery design exploration

The integration of shape grammars within a generative system is thought to have good potential to support design applications in the art and cultural domains. Based on a shape decomposing method, two-level generative shape grammars are developed within the application of Zhuang ethnic embroidery design. In our approach, free B-spline curves are used to derive initial design concepts together with a new interpolation algorithm. In order to cope with the potentially huge solution space, a novel aesthetic evaluation model and a design exploration algorithm are developed for designers to find their favorite design solutions based on their subjective assessments. A system is introduced to demonstrate this research with an example of Zhuang ethnic embroidery design.

A multi-agent framework for collaborative product design

To survive the increasing worldwide competition, new technologies are required by product manufacturers to improve both effectiveness and efficiency of collaborative design and. In this paper, a computational model of collaborative product design is proposed to facilitate the management and coordination of the collaborative product design process. Based on this model, the system architecture of a multi-agent framework for collaborative design is discussed. A software prototype featured by flexibility, scalability, distributed decision-making, and etc., is now being developed.

Supporting collaborative product design in an agent based environment

One of the problems in building collaborative and intelligent design systems is the difficulty in integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) with design knowledge to generate results to the satisfaction of designers who often have high demands on aesthetics as well as scientific aspects of a supporting tool. In this paper, we present an open and flexible design computing architecture, which has the characteristics of both Client/Server (C/S) model and distributed model. Two collaboration processes (synchronous and asynchronous) are facilitated in this proposed architecture. For the design of agents, we propose a new model to deal with various types of knowledge sources, which have to be incorporated in the collaboration process. Versioning and locking mechanisms are implemented to support synchronous and asynchronous collaborations. Based on this architecture, a collaborative design environment has been implemented using the standard of Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM).

Novel design methodology supporting product life-cycle design

Existing computational design technologies are insufficiently developed to integrate the design activities during the product lifecycle. The main reason is three fold: inhomogeneous requirement, function and form definition in the general design context, ill nature of function-to-form mapping and difficulties of design synthesis with qualitative information. Although computational design technology has progressed in the past two decades, there have been little radical changes from a designers point of view. Therefore, this paper introduces a function-oriented, axiom based generalized mapping scheme, including generalized mapping among requirement domain, function domain and form domain, etc. The mapping issues and the default logic reasoning on recognition and reconstitution of product geometric and topologic information are explored in this paper. The proposed methodology is proved to be effective in the development of common use design tools. A mechanical hand and a water recycling apparatus design examples show a 20 times increase in efficacy with the developed enhancement modules based on this methodology on a general 3D CAD plate form.

Formulation of Aesthetic Evaluation & Selection

Abstract. The application of evolutionary algorithms in an aesthetic domain involves human subjective judgment and artificial selection. Evolutionary systems that facilitate this selection strategy are referred to as Interactive Evolutionary Systems (IES). One of the crucial problems for IES is that artificial selection is a time consuming process during which human users are faced with limited scale of the population and high dimensionality of solution space. This paper addresses this problem through an integration of General Regression Neural Network (GRNN) and an IES, using facial character creation as an example domain. This approach formulates designers’ aesthetic fitness evaluation in an IES through a learning mechanism provided by the GRNN. Our aim is to build an intelligent and evolutionary system that possesses some empirical knowledge as well as a convergent thinking ability to support human users. In order to study the feasibility of our approach, we have implemented a prototype system for evolutionary facial character creation. The initial results generated by this system are reported in this paper.